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THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST 
MOVEMENT 



BY 

PRESTON WILLIAM SLOSSON, A. M. 



SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS 
FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 

IN THE 

Faculty of Pc^litical Science 
Columbia University 



NEW YORK 
I916 



? 



Copyright, 1916 

BY 

PRESTON WILLIAM SLOSSON 



iC-i Olj 



.r;i:iM7 



mv z i^is 



PREFACE 

The present study is rather a problem in causation than 
a complete narrative of the Chartist movement. During a 
score of years, which may be roughly indicated as lying 
between the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 and the 
outbreak of the Crimean War, the portion of the British 
laboring classes which aspired to play a part in national 
politics entered the political arena not as an ally of the 
middle-class reformers but as an independent party with a 
program and an organization of its own. Ever since that 
time many individuals have preached class-consciousness to 
the workers, but it was not until the recent organization of 
the Labour Party that a political party based upon class 
lines was again able to win the allegiance of a majority or 
even a large minority of British workingmen. Even the 
present-day Labour Party has been less independent of the 
Liberals than were the Chartists, although this may be due 
rather to the necessary compromises of Parliamentary work 
than to lack of class feeling. Why a popular movement, 
so generally supported by the unenfranchised classes of 
Great Britain as was the Chartist agitation, should have 
been abandoned without attaining the program of reforms 
to which it was pledged is a difficult and complex question 
and one to which insufficient attention has been paid. The 
aim of the present survey has been to contribute a little to 
the discussion of this vitally important question in the 
political history of Great Britain in the nineteenth century. 
The writer owes much to the Columbia School of Political 
Science for instruction and inspiration, but an especial debt 
253] 5 



PREFACE 



[254 



of gratitude to Professor James T. Shotwell for taking this 
study in charge; to Professor Carlton Hayes and to Pro- 
fessor WilHam Archibald Dunning for the time and atten- 
tion which they have so freely given to supervising its 
preparation; to Professor Edwin R. A. Seligman for gen- 
erously granting access to the remarkable collection of source 
material for British social history in his library; to Mr. 
Edward A. Porritt, author of The Unreformed House of 
Commons, for helpful suggestions; and to Mr. J. H. Park, 
whose forthcoming study of The Reform BUI of 1861 adds 
to this another chapter in the struggle for the reform of 
the British franchise. 

Preston William Slosson. 
IvIay, 1916. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Preface 5 

Introduction ii 

CHAPTER I 

Chartism as a Class Movement 

Popular distrust of the middle-class Radicals 17 

Organization of the Chartist party 19 

The demand for further political reform 21 

The Charter as a class document 22 

Economic character of the movement recognized by its opponents. .... 28 

Aims of Chartist leaders 31 

Views on national revenue and taxation 31 

On state subsidized co-operation 33 

The land -monopoly grievance 35 

Small holdings championed 37 

Abolition of primogeniture , 38 

Land nationalization versus peasant proprietorship 39 

Anticipation of the single tax by O'Brien 42 

Confidence in political action as a means to social betterment 43 

''Sources of Chartist strength 44 

The trades unions 45 

General poverty of the industrial classes 46 

Opposition of the Chartists to the Anti-Corn Law League 47 

Opposition to the factory system 51 

Attitude of the ruling classes to social legislation 52*^ 

The reform of the Elizabethan Poor Law 54 

Chartist attacks upon the new law 57 

CHAPTER II 

The High Tide of Chartism 

Chief periods of Chartist activity 60 

The petition of 1842 61 

Numbers associated with the movement in that year 62 

The industrial depression of 1842; extreme poverty among the people ... 63 

255] 7 



g CONTENTS [256 

PAGS 

Peel's first reform of the Corn Laws 65 

Agitations and disorders ; the great strike of August 66 

Attempt to turn the strike into a political demonstration 68 

Repression of the agitation 69 

Political alliance with Sturge's Complete Suffrage Union ; the conference of 

April 72 

Chartist activity in the elections for Parliament 73 

Failure of the December conference 74 

Disappearance of the Complete Suffrage Union 77 

CHAPTER III 

The Disintegration of the Chartist Movement 

Weakness of the movement after 1842 78 

Increasing influence of O'Connor 7^ 

The debate with Bright and Cobden 80 

O'Connor alienates rival leaders from the party 81 

Physical force versus moral force methods 82 

O'Connor's land plan ; its failure 84 

Continued industrial disorders 93 

Revival of Chartist strength , 94 

Chartist success in the elections of 1847 94 

Chartist revolutionary spirit in 1848 95 

Alarm of the government and of the general public 97 

The demonstration of April tenth 99 

Evidence of the waning strength of the movement as shown by the petition 

of 1848 loi 

Repressive measures taken by the authorities 102 

Loss of popular interest in the agitation 103 

Rival reform organizations started 106 

Dominant influence of Ernest Jones after 1848 io9 

Attempts to revive the Chartist movement no 

Failure to sustain the party organization "3 

CHAPTER IV 

The Improvement in the Condition of the British Working 
Class after 1842 

Difficulty of determining the influence of economic factors 115 

Recovery of business from the depression of 1842 117 

Evidence of improved condition of the people 119 

Continued high prices of foodstuffs 1 19 

Repeal of the Corn Laws 121 

Effect on prices 123 



257] CONTENTS g 



PACK 



Limitation of hours of labor in mines and factories 124 

Reform in Poor Law administration 127 

Industrial depression of 1847 ^^7 

Changes in wages during the Chartist agitation 129 

In factories 129 

In mines 130 

In hand labor 130 

In agriculture 131 

The " golden age " of British agriculture 132 

Commercial and industrial prosperity 133 

Evidences of a rise in the standard of living among the working classes . 134 
Illustration of the effect of changes in wages and prices upon the intensity 

of agitation for the Charter 136 

CHAPTER V 

A Discussion of the Causes of the Decline of the Chartist Movement 

Failure of 1 848 rather a symptom than a cause of weakness 138 

No new working-class movement in politics takes the place of Chartism . 141 

Decline not a result of political concessions nor of governmental repression 141 

Internal weaknesses of the party 142 

Lack of direct representation in Parliament, due mainly to its class character 142 

Lack of a definite economic program 145 

Lack of agreement on questions of policy 147 

Ineffective leadership 149 

Harmful influence of O'Connor 159 

Incessant friction and jealousy among party leaders 15 1 

Loss of popular support not due to increased conservatism or to the progress 

of popular education and political reform 153 

Effect of remedial legislation 155 

Effect of the triumph of the Anti-Corn Law League 156 

Unwise attitude towards middle-class radicalism 157 

Effect of the return of prosperity 160 

Proof of the influence of economic factors , . , 162 

Summary of most important causes 166 

CHAPTER VI 

The Response of the Ruling Classes of Great Britain to the 
Chartist Movement 

The middle-class Radicals regain control of the movement for political dem- 
ocracy 169 

Effect of Chartism as a demonstration of popular discontent 17c 



lO 



CONTENTS [258 



PAGE 

Chartism but one phase of the general labor movement 171 

Activities of the Christian Socialists 172 

Patronage of the co-operative movement 174 

Championship of the labor unions . 175 

Altered attitude of the ruling classes to social problems 177 

The emigration movement .... 178 

Alliance of the British labor movement with the Irish nationalists broken 

up by heavy Irish emigration 179 

Attempts in Parliament to reform the franchise 181 

The accomplishment of the principles of the Charter 184 

Disraeli and the Tory Democrats 186 

Gladstone and the new Liberalism 187 

CHAPTER VII 

The Permanent Influence of Chartism on the British Working Class 

The working classes adopt " more quiescent means of elevation " .... 188 

The co-operative movement absorbs many Chartists 189 

Rapid development of trades-unionism 192 

Anticipation of Marxian Socialism in the Chartist movement 196 

Effect of the movement in training the working classes in self-reliant action 198 

Chartism as an educator 199 

Interest of the Chartists in the liberal and revolutionary movements of con- 
tinental Europe i99 

Chartism and the Crimean war 202 

Chartist praise of the United States of America 204 

Effect on the working classes during the American Civil War 206 

Awakening of political interest of working women 206 

The equal suffrage Chartists 207 

What became of the Chartist leaders after the close of the movement . . , 208 

Place of Chartism in history 209 

Bibliography 211 

Index 215 



INTRODUCTION 

The six demands of the People's Charter: manhood 
suffrage, equal election districts, annual Parliaments, aboli- 
tion of the property qualification for members of the House 
of Commons, vote by ballot, and salaries for members of 
Parliament, had all been long familiar to British reformers 
before they attained such a degree of popular support 
as makes it possible for us to speak of a Chartist viovement. 
The Chartists themselves claimed that their aim was but to 
restore the ancient constitution of England as it existed 
prior to the rise of the centralized Tudor monarchy. His- 
tory does not justify their faith, but dates the Charter as a 
political demand from the latter part of the eighteenth 
century. Major John Cartwright urged four of its six 
points in 1776, and Charles James Fox later advocated them 
all. Even the name " Charter " for a political program 
was no novelty. A pamphlet of 1832, entitled The People's 
Charter,^ besides recommending such political reforms as 
universal suffrage, vote by ballot and annual Parliaments, 
advocated numerous other reforms which it assumed would 
result from political democracy, such as an untaxed press, 
factory legislation, a militia instead of a standing army, 
abolition of the kingship, and the further abolition of numer- 
ous abuses; such as, sinecures and high salaries, the es- 
tablished church, the bank monopoly, primogeniture, the 
com laws, the poor laws. West Indian slavery, the national 
debt, the peerage, the game laws, imprisonment for debt, 

1 The People's Charter, an abstract from The Rights of Nations 
(London, 1832). 

259] II 



12 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [269 

and all taxes except a graduated property tax. All of these 
aims were congenial to the Chartists, but it seems, on the 
whole, that the date of this pamphlet is more significant 
than its title. It did not clearly recommend all of the six 
points of Chartism and its elaborate detail is characteristic 
of the doctrinaire radicalism of the years before the Reform 
Act of 1832, 

The germ of the Chartist party was the London Working- 
men's Association, under the able leadership of William 
Lovett. While the phrasing of the People's Charter varied 
somewhat at different periods, the text of the 1837 petition 
of the London Workingmen's Association ^ is typical of 
later forms : 

Equal Representation. That the United Kingdom be 
divided into 200 electoral districts, dividing as nearly as possible 
an equal number of inhabitants ; and that each district do send 
a representative to Parliament. 

Universal Suffrage. That every person producing proofs 
of his being 21 years of age to the clerk of the parish in which 
he has resided for six months, shall be entitled to have his 
name registered as a voter. That the time for registering in 
each year be from the ist of January to the ist of March. 

Annual Parliament. That a general election do take place 
on the 24th of June in each year, and that each vacancy be 
filled up a fortnight after it occurs. That the hours of voting 
be from six o'clock in the morning till six o'clock in the evening. 

No Property Qualifications. That there shall be no property 
qualifications for members ; but on a requisition signed by 200 
voters, in favour of any candidate, being presented to the clerk 
of the parish in which they reside, such candidate shall be put 
in nomination. And a list of all the candidates nominated 
throughout the district shall be stuck on the church door in 
every parish, to enable voters to judge of their qualifications. 

^ Bronterre's National Reformer, Feb. 11, 1837. 



26l] INTRODUCTION 1 3 

Vote by Ballot. That each voter must vote in the parish 
in which he resides. That each parish provide as many ballot- 
ing boxes as there are candidates proposed in the district, and 
that a temporary place be fitted up in each parish church for 
the purpose of secret voting. And on the day of election, as 
each voter passes orderly on to the ballot, he shall have given 
to him by the officer in attendance, a ballotting ball which he 
shall drop into the box of his favorite candidate. At the 
close of the day the votes shall be counted b> the proper officers, 
and the numbers stuck on the church doors. The following 
day the clerk of the district and two examiners shall collect 
the votes of all the parishes throughout the district, and cause 
the name of the successful candidate to be posted in every 
parish of the district. 

Sittings and Payments to Members. That the members do 
take their seats in Parliament on the first Monday in October, 
next after their election, and continue their sittings every day 
(Sundays excepted) till the business of the sitting is termin- 
ated, but not later than the first of September. They shall 
meet every day (during the session) for business at ten o'clock 
in the morning, and adjourn at four. And every member shall 
be paid (quarterly) out of the public treasury £400 a year. 

That all electoral officers be elected by universal suffrage. 

It will be seen that had the Charter become the law of the 
land several incidental reforms would have been accom- 
plished as well as the six points; such as the abolition of 
plural voting, nominations by popular petition, a decrease 
in the size of the House of Commons and a mandatory 
working week for the representatives of the people. In 
1839 ^ the Chartist proposal increased the number of elec- 
toral districts to three hundred and the remuneration of 
members of Parliament to £500 a year. But no important 
change was ever made in the Charter except that whereas 

1 Chartist Circular, Oct. 5, 1839. 



14 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [262 

during the first two or three years of the movement it was 
customary to speak of the " five points," neglecting the 
question of equal electoral districts/ during the period 
covered by this study the word " Charter " invariably stood 
for all six of the fundamental reforms of the party. 

Besides the text of the Charter itself, and the various 
preambles to the successive petitions to the House of 
Commons consisting for the most part of surveys of popu- 
lar grievances, the best primary records of Chartism are the 
pamphlets and newspapers of the party. Over fifty Chartist 
pamphlets are listed in Gotthilf Dierlamm's Die Flugschrif- 
tenliteratur der Chartistenbewegung (Naumburg, 1909) ; 
over sixty periodicals more or less Chartist are given in 
R. G. Gammage's History of the Chartist Movement 
(London, 1894) or in other secondary sources. The non- 
Chartist press devoted no little attention to the movement, 
and a fairly complete — if not altogether unbiassed — history 
of Chartism could be compiled from the London Times, the 
Annual Register, Hansard's Parliamentary Debates and 
similar external sources without any reference to Chartist 
authorities. The memoirs or miscellaneous writings of the 
Chartist leaders, such as William Lovett, Thomas Cooper, 
J. Bronterre O'Brien, G. J. Holyoake, S. B. Bamford, W. 
J. Linton and many others, are of course of great value ; but 
it should always be remembered in reading them that no 
movement was ever more torn by faction and internal strife 
than the Chartist, and that it is in consequence hopeless to 
seek a quite unprejudiced criticism of men and events. 
Valuable sidelights are thrown upon the course of the move- 
ment by the writings of sympathetic contemporary observ- 
ers, such as Charles Kingsley, Benjamin Disraeli, Thomas 
Carlyle, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. 

^ The prayer of the petition of 1839 as given in Hansard, 3d series, 
vol. xlviii, p. 227, does not mention equal electoral districts. 



263] INTRODUCTION 1 5 

We are not so well off for secondary sources of Chartist 
history as for primary. R. G. Gammage's History of the 
Chartist Movement is indeed the one book which is indis- 
pensable to every student of the movement, as much so to- 
day as when it was written in 1854. This is not only be- 
cause it is a full and well-considered outline of the actual 
events of the movement, not only because of much valuable 
information assembled by the author, but because Gammage 
was one of the party leaders and so was possessed of much 
inside information which is unobtainable elsewhere. But 
Gammage's book is not impeccable. The 1894 edition con- 
tains letters by his fellow Chartists Thomas Cooper and 
William Ryder correcting errors in his account, and the 
author acknowledges the justice of many of their correc- 
tions. In the Life of Thomas Cooper, by Himself (London, 
1872), Cooper criticizes Gammage's History yet further, 
adding, however, the consolatory remark (true even today) 
that " I know no person living who could write a History 
of Chartism without making mistakes." ^ More important 
than a few minor and inevitable misstatements is the strong 
partisan bias which Gammage shows on every page, though 
to no greater a degree than other Chartists. But the chief 
reason for regarding his work rather as a valuable source 
than as a satisfactory history is that while an admirable 
chronicle it is nothing more ; it does not give that economic 
background which is essential to any understanding of the 
causes of events. Many brief and well-balanced incidental 
accounts of Chartism occur in general histories, such as 
W. M. Molesworth's A History of England from the Year 
1830 (London, 1872), vol. ii; H. M. Hyndman's The His- 
torical Basis of Socialism in England (London, 1883), 
and, the best of all perhaps. The Rise of Democracy, by 
J. Holland Rose (London, 1897). 

1 Life of Thomas Cooper, p, 278. 



1 6 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [264 

Although Chartism was a purely British movement, 
the student will find secondary material comparatively 
abundant in languages other than English, particularly in 
German. The best and fullest account of the Chartist 
movement as a whole and also of many of its special 
phases, such as its relation to the feminist movement, 
is to be found in Hermann Schliiter's Die Chartisten- 
Bewegung (New York, 191 6). This work, which is 
an elaboration of Die Chartistenhewegung in England 
in the Sozial-Demokratische Bibliothek, vol. xvi (Zurich, 
1887), is written entirely from the standpoint of ortho- 
dox Marxian Socialism. Its only rival for complete- 
ness and scope is Le Chartisme, by fidouard Dolleans 
(Paris, 1912), which is in two volumes and contains over 
nine hundred pages. This work is rather vague and diffuse, 
and, while it quotes freely, lacks a bibliography. In German 
we have also a very valuable study of the origins of the 
movement in Die Entstehung und die Okonomischen Grund- 
s'dtse der Chartistenhewegung, by Dr. John L. Tildsley 
(Jena, 1898) ; also Die Flugschriftenliteratur der Chartis- 
tenhewegung, op. cit., based in part on Dr. Tildsley's work, 
and Die Englische Chartistenhewegung, by Lujo Brentano, 
Preussische Jahrbilcher, vol. xxxiii (Berlin, 1874). In 
Russian there is a brief account, Chartistskoe dvizhenie, by 
N. B. Krichevski (St. Petersburg, 1906). 



CHAPTER I 
Chartism as a Class Movement 

Chartism may be briefly defined as that phase of the 
movement for poHtical democracy in Great Britain which 
centered its hopes upon the six principles of the People's 
Charter : manhood suffrage, equal election districts, annual 
Parliaments, abolition of the property qualification for 
membership in the House of Commons, vote by ballot, and 
payment for members of Parliament. The Charter was but 
one of many radically democratic programs which were pro- 
posed during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, 
but it was the only one to find general support among the 
still unenfranchised classes. The aim of each of the points 
of the Charter was to win for these classes a majority in 
the House of Commons ; for it was believed that control of 
the House of Commons implied control of the government, 
and that the king and the House of Lords could no more 
resist a working-class majority in the lower house than they 
had been able to resist the majority of middle-class reform- 
ers in that house in 1832. 

Prior to the Reform Bill of 1832, the British working 
classes had never entered politics as a separate party. The 
violence of the Luddite machine wreckers, the growth of 
trades unions and the prevalence of strikes indicated, in- 
deed, the sharpest conflict between manufacturers and oper- 
atives in the economic field, but both joined forces to attack 
the virtual monopoly of power enjoyed by the landlord 
265] 17 



l8 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [266 

class. In 1832, there were two main political groups in 
Great Britain, the reformers, including both the Whigs and 
the Radicals, and the anti-reformers, or Tories. But the 
victory of reform was followed by the division of the re- 
formers into factions. The Whigs, or ministerialists, op- 
posed further political change, at least until the country 
should have fully recovered from its years of agitation. 
The Radicals desired extensive changes in the civil and 
criminal law; the abolition of special privileges, such as 
the Anglican Church enjoyed; complete free trade, and 
an immediate extension of the franchise. Most of the 
Radicals favored household suffrage, the ballot, abolition 
of the property qualification for the House of Commons, 
and shorter sessions of Parliament; some of them favored 
every point of the Charter. They were not sufficiently 
numerous in the House of Commons to form a ministry or 
even to organize as a formally separate party, but they criti- 
cized the government freely, contested Whig seats at elec- 
tions, and frequently voted against the ministry on crucial 
divisions. Their influence was far out of proportion to 
their numbers, for their leaders included some of the ablest 
men in Parliament, and had, besides, the moral weight of a 
widespread popular support. 

Before the meeting of the reformed Parliament the Radi- 
cals had not regarded themselves nor were they regarded 
by the people as primarily representatives of the middle 
classes. They were rather considered as the champions of 
popular rights and the expounders of popular grievances 
in general; their political and economic policies were un- 
derstood to favor the interests of the laborers as well as 
manufacturing and commercial interests. Some of the 
earlier Radicals, indeed, specialized in reforms of interest 
to the working classes. Francis Place, for example, de- 
voted himself chiefly to securing liberty for the trades 



26;] CHARTISM AS A CLASS MOVEMENT 19 

unions. William Cobbett, one of the older generation of 
reformers, although new to Parliament, vigorously opposed 
the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834/ But the Radical 
leaders most prominent during the period of Chartist activ- 
ity, Bright, Cobden, Hume, Roebuck and Lord Brougham, 
were regarded with growing dislike and disfavor by many 
of the artisans, while retaining the confidence of a large pro- 
portion of the middle classes. There were two main causes 
for this growing political opposition between the working 
classes and their employers : the fact that the Reform Bill 
greatly increased the opportunity of the middle classes to 
obtain representation in Parliament, while leaving the 
workers practically without direct influence upon the parties 
in the House of Commons; and the entrance of economic 
issues, upon which the interests of the two classes were 
opposed, into the sphere of practical politics. The masses 
of the people found that the Radicals were no longer repre- 
senting them, and their discontent continued to grow until 
it ripened at last into the Chartist movement. 

The Chartists, unlike the Radicals, must be reckoned 
not only a separate political group but a separate political 
party. They stood quite independent of the Whig and 
Tory organizations and maintained party machinery of 
their own. The general policies and tactics of the party 
were determined in conventions of delegates chosen by 
local Chartist associations, and their execution was left to 
a permanent executive committee and to paid lecturers and 
propagandist agents. The organization was the product 
of a merger between the London Working Men's Associa- 
tion, led by William Lovett and Henry Vincent; the Bir- 
mingham Political Union, including Thomas Atwood and 
John Collins ; and the political unions organized by Feargus 

1 Cf. infra, p. 57. 



20 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [268 

O'Connor/ In 1840, these organizations took the common 
name of the National Charter Association. Any person 
taking out a card of membership, renewable quarterly for 
the nominal fee of twopence, was admitted. The execu- 
tive, elected by the whole membership of the association, 
consisted of a secretary, a treasurer, and five other mem- 
bers. The secretary and the treasurer each received two 
pounds a week for their services, and the other members 
thirty shillings a week during their sittings. The executive 
had at its disposal half the funds of the association.^ Of 
the many alternative forms of party organization proposed, 
perhaps the most interesting was that by Dr. McDouall, 
who suggested in 1841 ^ the organization of the party by 
trades. There should be, for example, a Shoemakers' Char- 
tist Association, not identified with any trade union but 
representing the political interests of the shoemakers as an 
industry. 

The separate party existence of the Chartists is often 
ignored because they were practically without representa- 
tion in Parliament.* Yet the movement absorbed the larger 
part of the politically active working class which had given 
invaluable support to the agitation for reform. The Char- 
tists could not consistently support the Whig ministry, 
since it was opposed to further popular agitation, but the 
Radicals would have welcomed the aid of a politically active 
working class which, even unenfranchised, would have lent 
weight to their demands. If the Radicals had not lost the 
confidence of the British working classes there might never 

* Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement, p, 15. 
' Ibid., pp. 183-4. 

* English Chartist Circular, vol. i, pp. S7-8. 

* Many of the Radicals in Parliament, however, were in sympathy 
with the Charter, and some of them, such as Thomas Duncombe, vig- 
orously advocated it on the floor of the Commons. 



269] CHARTISM AS A CLASS MOVEMENT 2I 

have been a Chartist movement; the poverty and dissatis- 
faction of the people, no matter how great, would only 
have increased the number of unrepresented Radicals. Dur- 
ing the decade following the Reform Bill, on the contrary, 
the working class drew away from their old allies and 
leaders, largely because of the attitude of the reformed 
House of Commons and even the most active of the Par- 
liamentary reformers towards the questions of social poli- 
tics which most interested the people. 

The Reform Bill of 1832 was a great disappointment to 
Radicals and Chartists alike. At no time during the Char- 
tist agitation did the number of electors in the counties and 
boroughs of England and Wales amount to one million. 
In 1853-4, the number of county electors was officially 
reckoned at 520,729; the borough electors at 430,311.^ 
363,375 electors were qualified under the ten-pound house- 
holder franchise; the rest representing older franchises. 
The Reform Bill not only left political power in the hands 
of a small minority of the nation, but superseded more 
democratic systems which had existed in a few of the 
boroughs. In the industrial borough of Preston, for ex- 
ample, the franchise had been extended to most of the male 
inhabitants ^ and the Reform Bill came there as a measure 
of restriction of the suffrage. Gilbert Slater is even of 
the opinion that as a result of these disfranchisements the 
proportion of British workingmen eligible to vote was 
smaller after 1832 than it had been before.^' In any case, 
the new uniform borough constituencies were marked off 
from the unenfranchised by a sharper class line than ever, 

^Parliamentary Papers, 1854 (69), liii, 219. 

*J. McCarthy, History of Our Own Times, 4 vols. (London, 1880), 
vol. i, pp. 109-10. 

^ G. Slater, The Making of Modern England (Boston, igis), P- 97- 



22 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [270 

since the new law enfranchised only the well-to-do and 
excluded none but the relatively poor. 

Both the Radicals and the reformers who were after- 
wards Chartists were willing to accept the Reform Bill as 
an instalment of justice. But a political system which 
might be tolerated as temporary they regarded as unendiqr- 
able if it were tO' be treated as a finality. Lord John Rus- 
sell, as chief of the Whig ministry, during the debates on 
the Reform Bill made it plain that he did not expect to see 
any further extension of the franchise even after the vic- 
tory of the Reform Bill,^ " because both those who sup- 
ported and those who opposed it were alike determined to 
go no further, but to use their best endeavors to preserve 
the renovated constitution, entire and unimpaired ". As 
soon as the Radicals became convinced that these words 
were not merely an attempt to reassure timid supporters of 
the measure, they accused the Whigs of betraying the 
democratic cause. Lord Brougham replied to Lord John 
Russell's defense of his course ^ by a vigorous attack in 
which he declared his readiness to support franchise re- 
form " even far beyond household suffrage ".^ But every 
attempt made in Parliament to alter the basis of the suf- 
frage, to introduce the ballot or to abolish the property qual- 
ification for membership in the House of Commons met 
with sharp ministerial opposition and was defeated by a 
decisive majority. 

The Chartists soon came to the conclusion that it was 
harder to obtain their six points from the reformed House 
of Commons than it would have been to win them had 
there been no reform at all, for the very reason advanced 

^ Hansard, 3d series, vol. xiii, p. 462. 
' Letter to the Electors of Stroud ( 1839) . 

* Reply to Lord John RusselVs Letter to the Electors of Stroud 
(1839), p. 15. 



271] CHARTISM AS A CLASS MOVEMENT 23 

by Lord Russell that the newly enfranchised were in no 
hurry to share their privileges, while the opponents of re- 
form were more than ever determined to prevent changes 
from extending further. In the opinion of the Chartists : 

The Reform Act admitted the middle classes to a share of that 
power which was fomierly engrossed by the aristocracy . . . 
but what is the consequence of the Reform Act to us, the 
people? Why, that the number of our opponents, of those 
interested to uphold the monopoly of legislative abuse, is more 
than doubled ; and, instead of having the middle classes on our 
side, making common cause with us against the aristocracy, 
we have to contend against a combination of the aristocracy 
and middle order. ^ 

They were resolved never to work again for any extension 
of the franchise short of manhood suffrage, lest they should 
be deceived once more by the creation of a new privileged 
class, the stronger because the more broadly based. In 
consequence they viewed the Radical efforts to obtain small 
concessions with positive suspicion as so many attempts to 
erect barriers against complete democracy. The favorite 
Radical franchise measure was household suffrage and this 
the Chartists strongly opposed. Two extracts from Char- 
tist periodicals on this issue will serve to illustrate the gen- 
eral Chartist attitude towards piecemeal reform : 

It is plain it would be preferable to have the old Tory system 
revived, to a £5 or Household Suffrage. By the former we 
might expect to have our ranks filled with men who, rather 
than have no extension, would demand Universal Suffrage; 
while, by the latter, we have the gloomy prospect of increased 
foes, and a decreased force to overcome them.^ 

^ Right and Expediency of Universal Suffrage (undated), p. 6. 
2 Chartist Circular, Sept. 5, 1840, italics in the original. 



24 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [272 

Six million non-electors could sooner wrest their rights from 
800,000 electors, than four millions could from three. Indeed, 
we should lose support, instead of gaining strength : now, great 
numbers of the middle class, being unenfranchised, are with 
us, because they want the vote — give them the vote, and having 
all they want — we can calculate on their support no longer.^ 

The Chartists not only refused to work with the Radicals 
for a partial extension of the franchise but regarded any 
other political reforms which were not accompanied by 
manhood suffrage as positive perils to democracy. The 
ballot was approved as one of the six points of the Charter ; 
standing by itself, it was considered a menace, since it de- 
prived the unenfranchised masses of the indirect influence 
they had been accustomed to exercise at election by cheer- 
ing or groaning as the voters announced their choice. Be- 
sides intimidation at the polls, the workers had another and 
more potent means of control over elections, namely, the 
boycott of tradesmen who failed to please their customers 
by their votes. The aristocracy openly resorted to this 
form of coercion at every election, and Chartists were ad- 
vised to follow the example thus set them.^ The Chartists 
regarded the unrestrained power of an enfranchised minor- 
ity to vote as it chose without reference to public opinion 
as comparable to secret balloting in Parliament.^ As the 
Chartist Circular put the matter : 

The franchise being limited, a power was vested by law in a 
given number of individuals, to perform a certain duty not for 
their own benefit — not according to their own pleasure, but 
for the good of the whole community, — would it then be rea- 
sonable to afford these men — men acting as agents for others, 

^ Notes to the People, p. 2^. 

^ Ibid., p. 225. 

' Bronterre's National Reformer, Jan. 15, 1837. 



273] CHARTISM AS A CLASS MOVEMENT 25 

to perform that duty secretly — to remove themselves com- 
pletely from the control of those for whose interests they 
were, or at least ought to be, acting ? ^ 

The other points of the Charter were urged by the Char- 
tists as much upon the basis of class interest as of demo- 
cratic theory. The redistribution clauses of the Reform 
Bill of 1832 had only touched the more glaring anomalies 
of representation. According to a census taken on March 
30, 1 85 1, the represented boroughs of Tower Hamlets, 
Liverpool, Marylebone, Finsbury, Manchester (City), 
Lambeth, Westminster (City), and Birmingham, with a 
combined population of 2,651,915, sent only sixteen mem- 
bers to Parliament, while an equal representation was ac- 
corded to the boroughs of Wells (City), Evesham, Dart- 
mouth, Harwich, Totnes, Thetford, Lyme Regis, Ashbur- 
ton, Honiton, and Arundel, whose population totaled only 
39,917.^ Many important English boroughs were still 
without any special representation ; among the metropolitan 
districts, Chelsea and Kensington, among the provincial 
towns, Birkenhead, Burnley, and Staleybridge, each with 
more than twenty thousand population. The inequalities 
in the counties were nearly as bad; the West Riding of 
Yorkshire sent two members to the House of Commons 
from a population of 794,779, while the population of Rut- 
land, also returning two, was only 22,983. The distribu- 
tion of seats in Parliament had a distinct class significance, 
since the boroughs and counties which were without ade- 
quate representation were the centers of large industrial 
populations, sure to be either Radical or Chartist in their 
sympathies. The necessity, then, for a redistribution of 
seats in accordance with population seemed as great, from 

* Chartist Circular, Oct. 26, 1839. 

'Parliamentary Papers, 1852 (441), xlii, 491 et seq. 



26 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [274 

the Chartist point of view, as the necessity for a widened 
suffrage. 

The property quaHfication for membership in the House 
of Commons required for representatives of EngHsh and 
Welsh counties an annual income from landed property 
of six hundred pounds ; members for boroughs, three hun- 
dred pounds/ This restriction did not apply to Scotland, 
nor to university representatives, and even in the English 
counties and boroughs it was often evaded or openly flouted. 
Nevertheless, this property qualification, taken in connec- 
tion with the absence, of any remuneration for members 
of Parliament, made it practically impossible for the Char- 
tists to secure any representation without going outside 
their own class for their leaders, and this they were very 
reluctant to do. "Of what use," asked Lovett, " is the 
giving me the vote and freedom of choice if I can only 
choose rich men ? " ^ The ballot was advocated by the 
Chartists as a protection to the poor voter from coercion 
by landlord or employer ; as we have seen ^ they cared noth- 
ing for the ballot unless accompanied by manhood suffrage. 
Annual elections for Parliament were deemed necessary to 
keep the people's representatives from losing touch with 
their constituents. The Chartists felt that each of the six 
points was not only just in itself but could hardly fail to. 
strengthen the radical and weaken the conservative forces 
in British politics, always provided that their program was 
enacted as a unit. 

The Chartists may have insisted too narrowly upon the 

* By a law passed in 1838 (I and II Vict., c. 48), personal as well as 
real property qualified for membership. 

* 'H. Solly, James Woodford, Carpenter and Chartist, 2 vols. (Lon- 
don, 1881). The citation is from a letter of William Lovett to the 
author, printed in the appendix of the book. 

3 Cf. supra, p. 24. 



275] CHARTISM AS A CLASS MOVEMENT zy 

exact terms of their Charter, but they never fell into the 
the error of treating political power as a sufficient goal for 
their efforts. The franchise they valued rather as an indis- 
pensable means for social and economic ends than for its 
own sake. Perhaps the most familiar illustration of this 
point of view of the leaders of the movement is from the 
speech of the Reverend J. R. Stephens, the Tory-Chartist, 
at Kersal Moor, near Manchester : 

The question of universal suffrage was, after all, a knife and 
fork question. If any man asked him what he meant by uni- 
versal suffrage, he would tell him, he meant to say that every 
working man in the land had a right to have a good coat and 
hat, a good roof over his head, a good dinner upon his table, 
no more work than would keep him in health, and as much 
wages as would keep him in plenty, and the enjoyment of 
those pleasures of life which a reasonable man could desire.^ 

Ernest Jones asked with equal emphasis : " What do we 
want political power for, except to grant free access to all 
the means of labour, land and machinery?"^ Friedrich 
Engels claimed in 1844 that there was no longer a mere 
politician among the Chartists. '^ Of course Engels may 
have been prejudiced by his desire to identify Chartism 
with international Socialism, but it would be difficult to 
bring any evidence against his statement. 

Chartism was not only an economic movement, it was a 
class movement. The London Working Men's Association 
of 1837, which would admit only laborers to its active 
membership, printed on its membership card : " The man 
who evades his share of useful labour diminishes the public 

^Annual Register, vol. Ixxx (1838), p. 311- 
* Notes to the People, p. 301. 

'F. Engels, Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 
<Lx>ndon, 1892; reprint from 1845), p. 235. 



28 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [276 

Stock of wealth, and throws his own burden upon his 
neighbour "/ Manhood suffrage was in the eyes of many 
not a question of the enfranchisement of individuals but 
of a hitherto unrepresented class. One Chartist paper 
even declared that " a constituency equal to our present 
one . . . might serve the purposes of good government as 
well as one ten times as large, or as well as universal suf- 
frage itself ", if it could only be arranged somehow that 
the new electorate should be " fairly selected from all 
classes of the community, in contingents proportional to 
their respective numbers ".^ It is, then, as a class-conscious 
proletarian agitation, similar to modern Socialism in its 
spirit if not quite so definite in its program, that Chartism 
must always be considered. 

The conservative opponents of Chartism were even more 
explicit about the economic aims of the movement than 
were its leaders. Their arguments were rarely directed 
against the abstract principle of manhood suffrage, but 
took, as a rule, one of two forms, that the Chartists were 
visionaries who held the erroneous idea that the mere pos- 
session of political power could alter the great unvarying 
laws of political economy in their favor, or that they were 
a party of revolutionists determined to use the six points 
as a means to effect the confiscation of all property. Lord 
John Russell, who took the former view of the agitation, 
wrote in 1839: 

Of the working classes who have declared their adherence to 
what is called the People's Charter, but few care for Universal 
Suffrage, Vote by Ballot, or Annual Parliaments. The greater 
part feel the hardship of their social condition ; they complain 
of their hard toil and insufficient wages, and imagine that Mr. 

' R. G. Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement, p. 9. 
* Power of the Pence, Feb. 10, 1849. 



277] CHARTISM AS A CLASS MOVEMENT 20 

Oastler or Mr. Fielden will lead them to a happy valley, where 
their labor will be light, and their wages high.^ 

Other conservatives, usually of the Tory type, saw a more 
definite and sinister purpose in the movement. In the opin- 
ion of Blackwood's Magazine, " What is meant, under any 
mystification of words we need not say, is — one universal 
partition, amongst the nineteen millions in this island, of 
the existing property, be its nature what it may, and under 
whatsoever tenure ".^ Two further citations from the 
same periodical carry us further into the details of this 
threatened general expropriation: 

Within three weeks, were it merely to earn their wages, the 
new house of legislators would have abolished all funded prop- 
erty, under the showy pretence of remitting to the people that 
annual thirty millions of taxes requisite for meeting the inter- 
est. Their second step would be, what already they parade 
as an " equitable distribution " of property.* 

Repudiation of state engagements . . . confiscation of prop- 
erty under the name of a graded income tax ; the abolition of 
primogeniture, in order to ruin the landed interest; the issue 
of assignats, in order to sustain the state under the shock to 
credit which such measures would necessarily occasion, might 
with confidence be looked for.* 

William Lovett and John Collins, writing from War- 
wick gaol, admitted that the two chief arguments of their 
opponents had been the fear of the repudiation of the 
national debt,^ and the denial of property rights in gen- 

* Letter to the Electors of Stroud, p. 33. 
' Blackwood's Magazine, Sept., 1842. 

» Ibid. 

* Ibid., June, 1848. 

* Chartism, by Wm. Lovett and John Collins (London, 1841). p. 18. 



30 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [278 

eral/ and attempted to reassure their readers on these 
points. That they were right in beheving that the real 
objection to their propaganda was fear of the economic 
consequences if it should succeed, is proved by the debate 
in the House of Commons upon the question of consider- 
ing the Chartist petition of 1842.^ Lord John Russell dis- 
claimed any hostility to the principle of democracy as 
such, saying: 

I can well believe, that in the United States of America — the 
only country which I should at all compare with this for the 
enjoyment of liberty and the full fruits of civilization — I can 
well believe, that in that country, where there is no monarchy, 
where every office is elective, where there is no established 
church, where there are not great masses of property, universal 
suffrage may be exercised without injury to order, and with- 
out danger to the general security of society.^ 

Thomas Babington Macaulay took a similar position, de- 
claring that he would not oppose imiversal suffrage even 
for the sake of preserving the existence of the crown and 
of the House of Lords, for these institutions were after all 
but means to an end, adding, however : " I believe that uni- 
versal suffrage would be fatal to all purposes for which 
government exists, and for which aristocracies and all 
other things exist, and that it is incompatible with the very 
existence of civilization. I conceive that civilization rests 
on the security of property." * Then he proceeded to paint 
a picture of the England of the future when property 
rights would no longer be safeguarded by a suffrage limited 
to men who had property of their own to protect : 

1 Chartism, op. cit., p. 22, 

2 Cf. infra, p. 61. 

' Hansard, 3d series, vol. Ixiii, pp. 74-75. 
* Hansard, op. cit, p. 46. 



279] CHARTISM AS A CLASS MOVEMENT 31 

I do not wish to say all that forces itself upon my mind with 
regard to what might be the result of our granting the Charter. 
... A great community of human beings — a vast people would 
be called into existence in a new position; there would be a 
depression, if not an utter stoppage, of trade, and of all those 
vast engagements of the country by which our people were 
supported, and how is it possible to doubt that famine and 
pestilence would come before long to wind up the effects of 
such a system. The best thing which I can expect, and which 
I think everyone must see as the result, is, that in some of 
the desperate struggles which must take place in such a state 
of things, some strong military despot must arise, and give some 
sort of protection — some security to the property which may 
remain.^ 

The conservative view of the Chartist movement no 
doubt exaggerated both the intentions of the leaders and 
their probable ability to carry their view^s into effect even 
in a House of Commons chosen on the basis of the six 
points, but it was right in supposing that the mainspring 
of the agitation was the desire of the w^orking classes, es- 
pecially in the great industrial towns, to improve their 
economic condition. To accomplish this, it is certainly true 
that the Chartist leaders without exception were in favor 
of legislation which would tend to secure " an equitable 
distribution of property ", although some sought this read- 
justment through the abolition of existing " class legisla- 
tion ", while others proposed legislative programs more or 
less socialistic in character. 

One of the chief abuses which the Chartists ascribed to 
the class character of the suffrage was the amount and kind 
of taxation to which the masses of the English people were 
subject. As the Edinburgh Review correctly stated the 
position of the Chartists, " On one point they would prob- 

1 Hansard, op. cit., pp. 50-51. 



32 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [280 

ably all agree — one reform they have long been taught by 
their leaders to regard as the most important and unques- 
tionable of all, — viz., a reduction in the amount, and an 
alteration in the incidence, of taxation." ^ They objected 
particularly to the accumulation of the national debt. By 
1842 the total debt, funded and unfunded, had increased by 
more than ten million pounds during the decade of the 
reformed parliamentary regime, reaching a total of £791,- 
757,816.^ Interest and other annual charges had increased 
by that time to £29,300,1 12. In their " National Petition " 
of 1842 the Chartists spoke of the national debt in terms 
which caused more comment and alarm among the members 
of Parliament than any thing else in the petition : 

Your petitioners complain that they are taxed to pay the 
interest of what is termed the National Debt — a debt amount- 
ing at present to eight hundred millions of pounds — ^being only 
a portion of the enormous amount expended in cruel and ex- 
pensive wars for the suppression of all liberty, by men not 
authorized by the people, and who, consequently, had no right 
to tax posterity for the outrages committed by them upon 
mankind.^ 

It would be unfair to assume from the mere fact that the 
Chartists denounced the national debt that they were pre- 
pared to outlaw it without compensation; although con- 
servative fears were in a measure excused by the fact that 
some of the party had expressed the hope that " the fund- 
holder's title to draw interest " might one day be abolished.* 

* Edinburgh Review, January, 1852. 

* Parliamentary Papers, 1857-8 (443), xxxiii, 165 et seq. 

' The whole text of the petition is given in Hansard, 3d series, vol. 
xlii, pp. 1376-81. 

* Chartist Circular, March 7, 1840. 



28l] CHARTISM AS A CLASS MOVEMENT 33 

The Chartists were not at one as to the proper principles 
of national finance; but they all favored direct as opposed to 
indirect taxation and they all favored a use of the taxing 
power, not only in such a way as to raise the needed revenue 
and to equalize the burden of governmental expenditure, 
but also to lessen the existing inequalities in the distribution 
of wealth. A Chartist periodical put this intention with 
remarkable frankness : " In theory, a property tax is the 
most equitable one that could be desired. Its principles and 
meaning are to mulct the rich for the poor, to level wealth, 
and to produce social equilibrium." ^ Ernest Jones, in- 
cidentally asserting the Marxian doctrine of the inevitable 
centralization of wealth, expressed the same view : " Wealth 
[in America] is beginning to centralize. It is in its nature 
— all other evils follow in its wake. It should be the duty of 
government to counteract that centralization by laws hav- 
ing a distributive tendency." ^ William Lovett, the ac- 
knowledged chief of the moderate or " moral force " 
Chartists, also praised direct taxation and favored the ab- 
sorption of the " unearned increment " of land values.* 
J. Bronterre O'Brien, called by Feargus O'Connor " the 
schoolmaster " of the Chartists, held that the land rental 
" would form a national fund adequate to defray all charges 
of the public service . . . without the necessity for any 
taxation." * 

J. Bronterre O'Brien and Ernest Jones were zealous cham- 
pions of the principle of co-operation, and promised them- 
selves that a Parliament reformed on the basis of the 

^ Power of the Pence, Dec. 23, 1848. 

' Notes to the People, p. 2. 

3 Lovett, Social and Political Morality (London, 1853), p. 191. 

* Propositions of the National Reform League for the Peaceful Re- 
generation of Society (1850). 



34 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [282 

Charter would subsidize cooperative industry. Their pur- 
pose should be : " To put an end to profitmongering — to 
emancipate the working-classes from wages-slavery, by en- 
abling them to become their own masters; to destroy 
monopoly and to counteract the centralization of wealth, 
by its equable and general diffusion." ^ O'Brien proposed 
to establish the right of the people to " a share in the public 
credit of the state, in the form of temporary loans or ad- 
vances from the proceeds of the rents, mines, fisheries, and 
other public property," in order that the people might " be 
able to stock and crop the lands rented from the State, or 
to manufacture on their own account." ^ Ernest Jones 
turns aside from a bitter attack upon the ineffectiveness of 
the attempts which had been made at co-operative produc- 
tion to ask : " But how would it be, if they had political 
power to give them a start? If they had a House of 
Commons to vote them £100,000,000 sterling, levied by di- 
rect taxation on the rich ? " ^ He would, however, have 
nothing to do with any co-operative enterprises which were 
operated upon less than a national scale, believing that such 
would only become new centers of privilege. 

Then what is the only salutary basis for co-operative industry ? 
A national one. All co-operation should be founded, not on 
isolated efforts, absorbing, if successful, vast riches to them- 
selves, but on a national union which should distribute the 
national wealth. To make these associations secure and bene- 
ficial, you must make it their interest to assist each other, in- 
stead of competing with each other — you must give them unity 
of action, and identity of interest.^ 

' Notes to the People, p. 27. 

^Labor's Wrongs and Labor's Remedy (undated pamphlet), p. 4. 
Cf. National Regeneration League, op. cit., p. 3. 
' Notes to the People, p. 603. 
* Ibid., p. 30. The italics are in the original. 



283] CHARTISM AS A CLASS MOVEMENT 35 

The land monopoly was one of the chief grievances of the 
Chartists, although it cannot be listed as one of the causes 
of the movement since the enclosure of the common lands 
was chiefly consummated about a generation earlier.^ This 
may be illustrated by the successive decrease in the number 
of acts of enclosure passed in each of the preceding de- 
cades of the century.^ 

From 1800 to 1810 905 

From 1810 to 1820 741 

From 1820 to 1830 192 

From 1830 to 1840 125 

And yet the process of enclosure had by no means stopped. 
In 1841, twenty-two acts of enclosure were passed, and in 
1842 twelve.^ The total amount of land which passed to 
private owners by these means from 1760 to 1843 was 
probably nearly seven million acres.* Briefly, the economic 
changes of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries 
transformed England from a country remarkable for the 
number of its independent peasantry, to one conspicuous 
by their comparative absence. The British freehold farm- 
ers have never recovered their former importance; and, as 
late as the great land survey of 1874- 1875, the total number 
of independent holdings in England and Wales, exclusive of 
wastes, common, house and garden plots of less than an acre, 
was only 269,547, and half of the agricultural land of the 
country was owned by a few more than two thousand 
persons.® 

1 For the beginnings of the enclosure movement, E. C. K. Conner, 
Common Land and Inclosure (London, 1912). 

* Parliamentary Papers, 1843 (325), xlviii, 467. ^ Ibid. 

* A. Toynbee, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution (London, 1884), 
p. 89. 

^Report of the Land Enquiry Committee (London, 1913), vol. i, 
introd. by Gilbert Slater, p. 83. 



36 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [284 

It is true that Chartism was essentially an urban move- 
ment and drew its strength in overwhelming preponderance 
from the industrial towns of Lancashire and the other 
northern counties. But it had no such opposition to the 
" agricultural interest " as was shown by the manufacturers 
and their representatives in Parliament. On the contrary, 
the Chartists were among the strongest opponents of the 
new industrial system and earnestly desired to get a large 
proportion of the factory workers back to the land. It 
was chiefly by taking advantage of the strength of this 
feeling that Feargus O'Connor was able to commit the en- 
tire movement to the success of his land plan.^ But while 
the Chartists saw a common grievance in British landlord- 
ism they were by no means agreed among themselves as to 
the appropriate remedy. Some favored the nationalization 
of the land ; others wished to establish a peasant proprietor- 
ship. The sharp divergence between these factions effec- 
tively prevented any union of the party upon a land program. 
It would not, however, be going too far to say that, however 
the Chartist leaders might differ upon the question of land 
ownership, they were agreed that the land must be restored 
to the people, that the great estates must be broken up into 
small farms, and that the principle of primogeniture in the 
entailing of land must be abolished. 

The attack on the land monopoly was not regarded as a 
novel attack on property, but simply as a restitution of rights 
once enjoyed and now unjustly withheld. The Chartist 
periodicals ever kept before the mind of their readers the 
idea that until the Tudor period almost all of the land of 
England was held by the yeomanry, and that this had been 
stolen from them bit by bit ever since through the class 
legislation which was the inevitable result of the restriction 

1 Cf. infra, pp. 84-93. ;., 



285] CHARTISM AS A CLASS MOVEMENT 37 

of the franchise. All of the acts of enclosure were regarded 
as part of this program of theft. In speaking of the land 
monopoly in Scotland, Ernest Jones concluded his attack : 
" Behold evil and remedy. Down with the 7800 landed 
monopolists. Restore the wages-slaves to those lands of 
which their forefathers were plundered. And behold the 
means in political power and in that alone." ^ The right of 
access to the land was regarded not only as an historic right, 
but as a natural right as well. " Every man who is willing 
to cultivate land and render it productive . . . should be 
allowed to possess a portion of land. . . . No man should 
be allowed to keep land in his possession uncultivated." ^ 

Since the Chartists were convinced that the right to ex- 
propriate the landlord was so clear, the only remaining ques- 
tion was the wisdom of this policy. Many economists of 
the day believed not only that the small farm was doomed 
to disappear in competition with the estate of the capitalist, 
but that this change, so far from being reactionary, was the 
way of progress. The enclosure movement had undeniably 
been accompanied by much agricultural improvement. The 
" gentleman farmer " invested heavily in the new machinery, 
tried experiments in stock-breeding, and spent a great deal 
in manuring and draining the soil. The theories of Arthur 
Young, advocate of the " new farming," dominated British 
economic thought. Chartism, in fact, was at its strongest 
just when this contrast between the new farming and the 
old was most marked, for the chief improvements of modem 
farming were then both known and used, but the average 
farmer had neither the capital nor the education to enable 
him to make use of them for himself. But the Chartists, in 
defiance of the regnant ideas of the time, championed the 
small farm system. They acknowledged that the weight of 

^ Notes to the People, p. 444. 

' The Reformer's Almanac, by Joseph Barker (London, 1848), p. 17. 



38 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [286 

contemporary authority was against them, but set down all 
opposition as due to the prejudices of the privileged. 
" There is amongst some," wrote Joseph Barker, " an outcry 
against small farms; but we believe the outcry originates 
with selfish men." ^ Ernest Jones estimated that an equal 
division of the arable land in the United Kingdom would 
give eleven acres to every family.^ 

The chief cause of the opposition to the institution of 
primogeniture seems tO' have been that it was an artificial 
means of maintaining the system of great estates which the 
Chartists believed to be so radically vicious. The question 
was brought forcibly to the attention of the nation in the 
formative year of the movement. Mr. Ewart had intro- 
duced a bill into the House of Commons on the fourth of 
April, 1837, making real property subject to the same laws 
of entail as other private property. It was rejected by a 
majority of thirty-three.® The smallness of the vote, 
twenty-one to fifty-four, shows how far outside the field 
of practical politics such a measure then was. The Chartists, 
however, were willing to go even beyond the scope of the 
measure rejected by Parliament and to favor legislation 
which would compel the division of landed property at death. 
William Lovett insisted that the testator " should not be 
empowered to determine that his property should pass on 
successively from heir to heir, to the prejudice of the 
younger branches of the family." * Joseph Barker held it 
was the law of entail and primogeniture that gave to the aris- 
tocracy their power, and added that, compared with this one 
evil, all other political evils were as nothing.* 

^ Reformer's Companion to the Almanac (Wortley, 1848), p. 153. 
^ Notes to the People, p. ili. j 

* Hansard, 3d series, vol. xxxvii, p. 740. 

* Social and Political Morality, p. 165. 

s Companion to the Almanac, op, cit., p. 123. 



287] CHARTISM AS A CLASS MOVEMENT 39 

But the agreement of the Chartist leaders as to the eco- 
nomic purposes for which they valued the franchise was 
wholly negative. All were opposed to a system of taxation 
which bore more hardly upon the poor than upon the rich, 
to the further accumulation of the public debt, to the land 
monopoly and to the principle of primogeniture. But there 
was no corresponding positive economic program. Some 
Chartists favored free-trade; others were protectionist. 
Some believed in peasant proprietorship and in voluntary co- 
operation; others desired the nationalization of the land 
and state ownership of industry. Some wished to work 
hand in glove with the labor unions, the co-operative stores 
and the Owenite Socialists ; others dreaded the effect of an 
alliance between the Chartist party and any parallel or 
competing reform movement. Disregarding minor points 
of difference, we may distinguish three main factions with- 
in the party on the question of property in the means of 
production and of distribution. 

Ernest Jones was the intellectual leader of the extreme 
collectivists of the party. Their aims were best phrased in 
the resolutions adopted by the Chartist convention of 1851, 
at a time when the organized movement was completely in 
the hands of this faction. These resolutions favored the 
complete nationalization of the land by government re- 
sumption of commons, crown lands and the lands of the 
Church, and by purchase from private owners ; the disestab- 
lishment and disendowment of the Church of England ; free, 
compulsory, secular education ; the founding of national co- 
operative societies; the establishment of the right of the 
poor to relief and employment; the placing of all taxes on 
land or on property; the extinction of the national debt by 
treating interest payments as installments of the principal ; 
the substitution of a militia for a standing army, and the 
abolition of capital punishment.^ 

1 The Friend of the People, April 12, 1851. 



40 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [288 

As we have already seen, Ernest Jones was at once the 
strongest advocate of co-operation on a national scale and 
the bitterest opponent of the co-operative movement of the 
time/ He viewed with equal suspicion the attempt to create 
a peasant proprietorship by increasing the number of small 
holdings, fearing lest a numerous body of small owners 
would prove a bulwark for the protection of large land- 
owners as well, since both would have an interest in up- 
holding the principle of private property in land.* " There 
is nothing," he wrote, " more reactionary than the small 
freehold system. It is increasing the strength of landlord- 
ism." ^ In common with other Chartists, he held that the 
small farm system was far superior to the English capital- 
istic agriculture, but he regarded this as only a relative super- 
iority. Better results than were obtainable by either of the 
existing methods might be obtained if the land were na- 
tionalized.* With that accomplished, " such a thing as 
pauperism, in its real sense, could hardly exist." ° It is 
surprising, in view of his opinions, that Jones worked for 
years as the closest ally of Feargus O'Connor whose pet plan 
was to establish just such a class of freehold farmers as 
Jones had denounced. 

Two of the most important and influential of the Chartist 
leaders, opposed on almost every point of policy, led the 

1 Supra, p. 34. 

' It is worth notice that Charles Kingsley opposed O'Connor's land 
plan on the ground that peasant proprietorship was a reactionary sys- 
tem, tending to sink the peasant into an animal and slavish condition. 
" For the town artizan ... to become a peasant proprietor would be, I 
conceive, nothing but a fall." The Application of Associative Prin- 
ciples arid Methods to Agriculture (1851), p. 59. 

^Notes to the People, p. 56. Italics are in the origfinal. 

* Ihid., pp. 256-7. 

^ Ibid., p. 120. 



289] CHARTISM AS A CLASS MOVEMENT 41 

individualist wing of the party. Feargus O'Connor wrote 
in The Labourer, a periodical which he edited in conjunc- 
tion with Ernest Jones in the interests of his land plan : 

I ever have been, and I think I ever shall be, opposed to the 
principle of Communism, as advocated by several theorists. 
I am, nevertheless, a strong advocate of Co-operation, which 
means legitimate exchange, and which circumstances would 
compel individuals to adopt, to the extent that Communism 
would be beneficial.^ 

" I am," he reassured the public, " even opposed to public 
kitchens, public baking-houses, and public wash-houses." " 
William Lovett was quite as outspoken. He thought that 
land nationalization, or even ownership vested in the muni- 
cipalities or other local bodies, would be not only unnec- 
essary but positively harmful. " Were the land divided 
into districts," he predicted, " and cultivated in common, 
and governed by majorities (locally or generally), there 
is reason for believing that the energies and virtues of the 
industrious, skilful, and saving, would soon be sunk and 
sacrificed for the benefit of the idle and extravagant." * 

Lovett's own inclination was always for social improve- 
ment through voluntary effort, without waiting for the day 
whenlhe Charter should become law and the action of the 
state on behalf of the people become possible. In the little 
booklet Chartism,^ he advocated the establishment of a 
National Association to be supported by penny-a-week con- 
tributions which should maintain places for public meeting, 
schools, circulating libraries, public baths, play grounds^ 

^The Labourer (1847-8), p. 149. 
*Ihid., p. 157. 

• Social and Political Morality, p. 163. 

* Cf. supra, p. 29. 



42 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [290 

and the like. This preoccupation with popular education 
and general welfare was viewed with no little suspicion by- 
some of Lovett's fellow Chartists, who feared lest the 
attention of reformers might be diverted from the all- 
important matter of winning the Charter. 

Perhaps a third school of economic theory might be dis- 
tinguished within the movement. J. Bronterre O'Brien 
cannot be wholly identified with the individualism of Lovett 
and O'Connor nor with the collectivism of Ernest Jones. 
He favored the nationalization of the land on the ground 
that " the nation alone has the just power of leasing out 
the land for cultivation and of appropriating the rents 
therefrom ".^ To this end he advocated purchase by the 
government of all private land upon the death of the 
owner of each holding and its subsequent division into 
small farms paying rent to the state. ^ And yet he opposed 
communism in anything but land. O'Brien's cautious state- 
ment that "if the means of acquiring and retaining wealth 
are equally secured to all in proportion to the respective in- 
dustry and services of each, I see no objection to private 
property ",^ might seem to impose a rather stringent condi- 
tion upon the institution of private property were it not for 
his optimistic conclusion that this just distribution of private 
wealth was by no means an impossibility. " I will never 
admit," he continues, " that private property is incompatible 
with public happiness, till I see it fairly tried. I never 
found an objection urged against it, which I cannot trace 
to the abuse, not to the u^e, of the institution." * 

The explanation of O'Brien's position is the very sharp 

^ Bronterre's National Reformer, Feb. 25, 1837. 
* Labor's Wrongs and Labor's Remedy, p. 4. 
^English Chartist Circular (1841-2), vol. i, p. 71. 
*^ Italics in the original. '•' 



291] CHARTISM AS A CLASS MOVEMENT 43 

distinction he drew between land and other forms of 
wealth. Land, minerals, and other forms of natural wealth 
ought to be nationalized, " because these are of God's and 
not man's creation "/ but we are not to fall into the " fatal 
delusion " of communism in the products of industry. 
Joseph Barker, another Chartist journalist of ability and 
influence, held that taxation should rest only on land, since 
" the land is not the produce of industry, but is itself wealth, 
independent of industry ".^ Barker did not, however, draw 
the conclusion from this principle that the land should be 
nationalized or even that all its rental value should be ab- 
sorbed by the state. In his view the state should impose 
only such a land tax as might be necessary to meet the 
current expenses of government. In the doctrines of 
O'Brien and Barker it is easy to see foreshadowings of 
Henry George and the theory of the Single Tax. 

But however Chartists might differ as to the ultimate 
aims which the Charter was to make possible, all were 
agreed that political power was a certain means to achieve 
the aims which each of them desired. It did not apparently 
occur to any Chartist leader that a democratic House of 
Commons could fail to enact all necessary reforms, although 
the divisions of opinion within the Chartist party itself 
should have warned the Chartists of possible disappoint- 
ment. Neither did they believe it possible that an unre- 
formed Parliament would ever enact any but class legis- 
lation. " A parliament," insisted O'Brien, " which repre- 
sents only those who thrive by labour's wrongs will never 
recognize labor's rights, nor legislate for labor's eman- 
cipation ".^ He did not believe that any considerable num- 

^ Power of the Pence, Jan. 27, 1849. 
» The People (1849), vol. i, p. 115. 

» O'Brien, The Rise, Progress and Phases of Human Slavery (Lon- 
don, 1885; first edition in 1850), p. 119. 



44 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [292 

ber of the working class could hope to acquire property 
enough by their own efforts to entitle them to citizenship. 
" Knaves will tell you that it is because you have no prop- 
erty that you are unrepresented. I tell you, on the con- 
trary, it is because you are unrepresented that you have no 
property ".^ S. B. Bamford summed up the party attitude 
admirably : " Quoting scripture, we did, in fact say, first 
obtain annual parliaments, and universal suffrage, and, 
' Whatsoever thou wouldest shall be added thereto '." ^ 
The Chartist movement resembled all modern proletarian 
movements in that its aims were economic, but it differed 
from more recent agitations by a unique belief in the effi- 
cacy of political action as a means. 

But the aims and theories of Chartist leaders do not 
suffice to determine the character of the movement. Not 
only had all six points of the Charter been familiar to Eng- 
lish radicals for decades, but all of the economic and social 
changes advocated or discussed in the Chartist press found 
champions before Chartism was organized and ever since 
it disappeared. The real question of the growth and de- 
cline of Chartism is the question of the varying amount of 
popular support afforded to the organization and its leaders. 
Chartism gave the British operative a standard to which 
to rally ; it was to him what Socialism is to-day, the political 
party which seemed most adequately to express his griev- 
ances and to offer the most plausible remedy for them. 
The recruits of the Chartist movement were drawn from 
the supporters of a number of previous popular agitations. 
The chief of these have been summarized by Dr. Tildsley 
as follows: 

^ Bronterre's National Reformer, Jan. 15, 1837. 

' S. B. Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical (London, 1844) ^ 
vol. i, p. II. 



293] CHARTISM AS A CLASS MOVEMENT 45 

The first of these movements was Owenism, the second the 
movement for the attainment of the Ten Hour Bill, the third 
sought the repeal of the New Poor Law, and the fourth . . . 
desired the defeat of Peel's Currency Bill of 1819 and ex- 
pressed itself in favor of the expansion of the circulating 
medium. We can hardly add to these four movements as a 
fifth that which aimed at the repeal of the Corn Laws, for in 
1837 such a movement was not yet organized. But from that 
time forth . . . there were few great workers' meetings in 
which these laws were not openly attacked. Their opponents 
increased and strengthened the Chartist movement.^ 

One factor in the influence of Chartism among the un- 
represented classes was the lack of other adequate outlet 
for their discontent. While the suffrage remained re- 
stricted they could have no share, other than agitation, in 
the political life of the country, and labor was not at that 
time sufficiently organized to make possible an effective 
struggle with capital in the economic field. The early years 
of Chartism were a period of great weakness among the 
labor unions. In 1841 the organization of the English 
and Scottish stonemasons collapsed, the Lancashire textile 
workers' organizations were inactive, the ironfounders, the 
boilermakers, and the journeymen of the millwrights and 
steam-engine makers were unable to maintain their unions 
in the face of widespread unemployment. The Glasgow 
workers had been particularly demoralized by the prosecu- 
tions directed against their violent methods in 1839.^ Char- 
tism profited by this discouragement of the workers with 
their efforts to win better conditions for themselves without 
a preliminary attainment of political power. The greater 
number of trades-unionists declared for the Charter, al- 

^ Die Entstehung der Chartistenbewegung, pp. lo-ii. 
* Sidney and Beatrice Webb, History of Trade Unionism (London, 
191 1), p. 157. 



46 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [294 

though the trades unions never joined the movement in a 
body as unions.^ 

But the strongest recruiting agent for the movement was 
what Thomas Carlyle named " the condition of England 
question ",^ Not only was the absolute degree of poverty 
great, but the sharp contrast existing between the misery 
and dependence of the masses and the opulence of the few 
edged discontent with bitterness. A very naive confession 
of the extent of this inequality was made by the ultra- 
conservative Blackwood's Magazine in an article directed 
against any extension of the franchise.^ " Out of nineteen 
million heads in this island ", so ran the estimate, " not 
three hundred thousand are connected with property suffi- 
cient to ensure the conservative instincts and sympathies 
of properties." The Chartist attitude towards the inequali- 
ties which Blackwood's recorded so complacently, is well 
shown in the bitter language of the petition of 1842 : 

That your petitioners, with all due respect and loyalty, would 
compare the daily income of the Sovereign Majesty with that 
of thousands of the working men of this nation; and whilst 
your petitioners have learned that her Majesty receives daily 
for her private use the sum of £164 17s. lod., they have also 
ascertained that many thousands of the families of the labour- 
ers are only in the receipt of 3%d. per head per day.* 

It is hardly surprising that the Chartist agitation, with its 
definite and attractive political program and its indefinite, 
but equally attractive, promise of social and economic better- 
ment, became the center of one of the most formidable popu- 

1 Sidney and Beatrice Webb, op. cit., p. 158. 

* T. Carlyle, Chartism (London, 1839), passim. 

* Blackwood's Magazine, Sept., 1842. 

•* Hansard, 3d series, vol. Ixxii, p. 1378. 



295] CHARTISM AS A CLASS MOVEMENT 47 

lar movements in English history. It is more remarkable 
that the British workingmen who took part in the movement 
should have fought for the Charter without any considerable 
body of allies from other ranks of society. The Radicals 
had been the party of the people and they were, as a group, 
sympathetic with the Chartist demand for complete political 
democracy.^ But the Chartists not only refused to consider 
themselves as a wing of the Radical party, they regarded the 
middle-class Radicals as their most inveterate enemies and 
lost no opportunity to criticize their activities in the House 
of Commons and to oppose their candidates at elections. 
Much of this opposition was due no doubt to mere class 
prejudice, a feeling that it was impossible for the oper- 
atives to work in the same party with their employers. But 
the specific issues which brought the Chartists into antagon- 
ism with Radicals as well as with the Whig ministry, were 
three in number: the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834; 
the negative attitude of the Radicals, as a party, to social 
politics in general and to factory legislation in particular; 
and the anti-Corn-Law agitation, which competed for popu- 
lar favor with the six points of the Charter during the years 
of greatest strength of the Chartist propaganda. 

The attitude of the Chartists toward the activities of the 
Anti-Corn-Law League is one that requires some explana- 
tion, since the demand for cheaper food was made on behalf 
of the industrial workers in the towns, the very class that 
formed the bulk of the Chartist party. Gammage believed 
that the Chartists who opposed the League might be divided 
into three groups : the masses who simply distrusted their 
employers and all the legislation favored by them ; Chartists, 
like William Lovett, who favored free-trade but wished to 
obtain the Charter first ; and the faction of Feargus O'Connor 

1 Cf. supra, p. 18. 



48 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [296 

and J. Bronterre O'Brien, who feared that free-trade meant 
lower wages and greater power for the manufacturers/ 
Lovett and Hetherington, in a letter to the Northern Star 
of September 22, 1838, pointed out that the Charter would 
without doubt be followed by an immediate abrogation of 
the Corn Laws.^ John Mason, speaking at Leicester in 
1840, charged the League with bad faith to the working 
classes, saying: " When we get the Charter we will repeal 
the Corn Laws and all the other bad laws. But if you give 
up your agitation for the Charter to help the Free Traders, 
they will not help you tO' get the Charter . . . ' Cheap 
Bread!' they cry. But they mean low wages."® The 
second resolution of the executive committee in 1842 de- 
clared : 

That this meeting unreservedly condemns all taxes levied upon 
bread and other necessaries of life, that it is of the opinion 
that the monopoly of food depends upon the monopoly of the 
Suffrage, that it has no confidence in any Government ap- 
pointed under the present system, and despairing of the re- 
moval of existing misery, is fully convinced that the total and 
entire repeal of the Corn and Provision Laws, can only be the 
act of a Parliament representing the interests and opinions of 
the whole people of Great Britain and Ireland.'* 

Henry Vincent also held the view expressed in this resolu- 
tion that it would be easier as well as better to obtain the 
repeal of the Corn Laws through the medium of a Chartist 
House of Commons than to agitate for it directly. Speak- 
ing at Bath on December 20, 1841, he gave as his opinion 
that nothing short of an agitation " almost bordering on 

* Gammage, op. cit., pp. 102-4. 

' Cited in E. Dolleans, Le Chartisme, vol. ii, p. 24. 

^ Life of Thomas Cooper, p. 136. ' 

* English Chartist Circular, vol. ii, p. 25. 



297] CHARTISM AS A CLASS MOVEMENT 49 

a Revolution " could obtain a repeal of the Corn Laws, and 
that " the same amount of exertion would obtain a perfect 
control over the Government." ^ The free-trade Chartists, 
then, regarded the activities of the Anti-Corn Law League 
as a harmful, perhaps deliberately harmful, division of the 
forces of reform which should be united upon the conquest 
of political democracy as a prerequisite to all economic 
reforms. 

Other Chartists, however, cannot be classified as free- 
traders. Many believed with the Ricardian economists that 
the amount of wages or the price of bread was a question 
of little permanent importance, since wages would tend 
in the long run to fall to mere subsistence.^ At a meeting 
in Manchester on March 19, 1841, the walls were covered 
with placards reading: "Why do these liberal manufac- 
turers bawl so lustily for the repeal of the Corn Laws? 
Because, with the reduced price of corn, they will be enabled 
to reduce the w^ages of the working men, in order that they 
may compete with foreigners who live upon potatoes." ' 
Debates betw^een the Chartists and the League were of fre- 
quent occurrence and not seldom ended in riot and disorder.* 
With the repeal of the Corn Laws the attitude of many 
Chartists changed. Previously the majority of the party 
promised themselves free-trade, at least in foodstuffs, as 
one of the results of the winning of the Charter. Even 
those who cared nothing for free-trade did not adopt a 
protectionist theory, but contented themselves with the argu- 
ment that the Anti-Corn Law League sought the benefit of 

* English Chartist Circular, vol. i, p. 201. 

* Tildsley, Die Entstehung der Chartistenbewegung, p. 84, 

* Archibald Prentice, History of the Anti-Corn Law League, 2 vols. 
(London, 1853), vol. i, pp. 192-3- 

* Cf. infra, p. 157. 



50 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [29S 

the manufacturers rather than that of the operatives. But 
after the victory of the League the Chartists could no 
longer contend that only a Chartist Parliament would re- 
peal the Com Laws, and it would weaken their propaganda 
to admit that an economic reform which was carried by an 
unrepresentative Parliament had been of great benefit to 
the working people. In 1841 an influential party periodical 
declared that the policy of the Chartists was " not to re- 
duce, but to abolish the taxes on all articles which press 
upon the industry of the laborer, and give cheap tea, tobacco, 
coffee, wines, etc., at the same time with cheap bread, wood, 
and sugar." ^ In 1848 another Chartist paper insisted 
that, while direct taxation was the simpler and so the better 
method, yet the worker in the end paid all taxes and could 
gain little or nothing by abolishing the taxes which pressed 
on industry; "as to the 'taxes on industry,' as they are 
called, a repeal of them never benefits the laborer, but 
always the capitalist that employs him, or the fixed income 
man, who consumes his produce." ^ " Free-trade," said 
this paper, " without reciprocity, without a reduction of 
rents and taxes, and without any guarantees to the working 
classes, against non-employment and reductions in wages, 
was and is a positive evil." ' 

The powerful influence of O'Connor was thrown against 
free trade. He hated the Whigs and the manufacturers so 
bitterly that he was almost willing to champion the " agri- 
cultural interest " against them. This position was espec- 
ially marked when he became interested in his land plan 
for re-establishing a British peasantry. Naturally O'Con- 
nor feared the effect of foreign competition upon his agri- 

^ McDoualVs Chartist and Republican lournal, May 29, 1841. 
^ Power of the Pence, Nov. 11, 1848. 

., Jan. 20, 1849; italics in the original. 



299] CHARTISM AS A CLASS MOVEMENT 51 

cultural venture, and he desired protection just as did other 
English landowners. Like other Chartists, too, he seems 
to have held the " home market " theory; considering that 
the working classes of Great Britain should be the best cus- 
tomers of the manufacturers of the nation, and viewing 
with suspicion the uncertainties of foreign trade/ Finally, 
it wag remembered by all Chartists that John Bright and 
Richard Cobden, the most prominent representatives of free 
trade theory to the country at large, were at the same time 
the strongest opponents of factory legislation in the House 
of Commons. 

The question of governmental regulation of the hours 
and conditions of labor brought the Chartists into sharpest 
conflict with the Radicals. The Radicals favored free 
trade as a commercial policy and unrestricted rights of 
contract ^ in industry. The Chartists did not share the 
Radical faith in the philosophy of laisses-faire; they were 
not agreed as to the benefits of free trade but they were 
unanimous in upholding the right of the state to supervise 
industry for the protection of labor. Harriet Martineau, 
writing as a Radical, thus scornfully characterized the 
Chartist position : " The Chartists understood nothing of 
the operation of the corn-laws against their interests; and 
they were so far from comprehending their own existing 
rights, while demanding others, that they permitted friends 
to urge the legislature to take from them the command of 
their only possession — their labor." ^ Miss Martineau was 

* Tildsley, op. cit., p. 89. 

* Many of the Radicals drew a distinction between the labor of adults 
and that of children and did not oppose state interference to protect the 
latter, but even in child-labor legislation they were apt to be very con- 
servative. 

^ H. Martineau, A History of the Thirty Years' Peace, 4 vols. (Los- 
don, 1877) . vol. iii, p. 494. 



52 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [300 

wholly correct in believing that the Chartists favored labor 
legislation to protect adults as well as children. This is 
proved by the language of their petition of 1842 : 

Your petitioners complain that the hours of labour, particu- 
larly of the Factory Workers, are protracted beyond the limits 
of human endurance, and that the wages earned, after un- 
natural application to toil in heated and unhealthy workshops, 
are inadequate to sustain the bodily strength, and supply those 
comforts which are so imperative after an excessive waste of 
physical energy.^ 

A few enlightened Tories such as Lord Ashley (later 
Earl of Shaftesbury) and a few such Radicals as John 
Fielden, were in full sympathy with the special interests of 
the working class. But the general position of Parliament 
during the earlier years of Chartist agitation was one of 
obstinate opposition to any such state interference with in- 
dustry as the Chartists desired. As leader of the Conser- 
vatives, Sir Robert Peel opposed the attempt to limit the 
hours of labor for women and children employed in the 
textile factories to ten hours a day,^ although it is true that 
he could not carry all of his party with him. John Bright, 
perhaps the greatest Radical leader, characterized the Ten 
Hours bill as " one of the worst measures ever passed in 
the shape of an act of the legislature".^ John Roebuck, 
another influential Radical, offered a resolution in 1844: 
" That it is the opinion of this House that no interference 
with the power of adult labourers in factories, to make con- 
tracts respecting the hours for which they shall be employed, 
be sanctioned by this House ".* Still more extreme expres- 

^ Hansard, 3d series, vol. Ixii, pp. 1376-81. 
* Ibid., vol. Ixxiv, pp. 1078-94. 
^ Ibid., vol. Ixxxix, p. 1148. 
^ Ibid., vol. Ixxiv, p. 611. 



30l] CHARTISM AS A CLASS MOVEMENT 53 

sions of the same attitude might be quoted. E. C. Tufnell 
enlivened his official report on factory conditions with the 
highly ingenuous remark that " the precise form of evil 
which the Ten Hour Bill would assume it is impossible to 
foresee, but certain it is, that nothing but evil could come 
from its operation "/ The Marquis of Londonderry, who 
had much property in coal mines, declared in the House of 
Lords that he would never allow his property to be in- 
spected. " As a coal owner, he should say to any inspector, 
' You may go down into the pit how you can, and when you 
are down, you may remain there '." ^ 

Although the Chartists, unlike most of the other factory 
reformers, made no distinction between legislation for chil- 
dren and for adults, for women and for men, they sup- 
ported every attempt made in Parliament to limit the labor 
of women and children. Besides the motives of humanity 
and the fact that the abuses of the existing industrial sys- 
tem appeared most clearly in the case of women and chil- 
dren, the British workingman had a double reason for 
favoring the proposed protective legislation. The cheap- 
ness of child labor and the simplicity of factory machinery 
endangered the workingman's own job, or at least his pre- 
vious standard of wages, by forcing him to compete with 
his own children in the labor market.^ In the second place, 
as the opponents of state regulation never wearied of point- 
ing out, women, children and young persons were com- 
monly employed as " helpers " or auxiliaries to the men 
who worked in the same establishment. A limitation of 
their labor operated in practise as a limitation of the labor 
of the men as well, and it was this limitation that the Radi- 

1 Parliamentary Papers, 1834, pt. i (167), xix, 259 et seq.; p. 214. 
* Hansard, 3(i series, vol. Ixv, p. 891. 

' On this point sec Parliamentary Papers, 1833 (4S0), xx, i et seq., 
25. 



24 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [302 

cals were chiefly concerned to oppose and the Chartists to 
defend. 

The other great issue between Radicals and Chartists 
was the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834/ superseding 
the Ehzabethan law of 1601 ^ and much subsequent legis- 
lation. J. H. Rose is of the opinion that in all probability 
" the People's Charter would never have been drawn up, 
but for the blaze of discontent caused by the exorbitant 
stamp duty on newspapers and by the severity of the new 
Poor Law of 1834 "/ and there is much contemporary evi- 
dence to confirm his view. Lord Stanhope declared in 
1839 that " He saw, alas! too much reason to expect that, 
at a future and no distant period, a Radical Reformer — 
perhaps some Chartist — would exclaim, with joy and exul- 
tation . . . ' Without the new Poor Law we should never 
have had universal suffrage '." * The purpose of the new 
law was to decrease the burden of the poor rates which 
threatened, under the old sytem of parochial relief, to 
pauperize a large part of the English laborers, especially in 
the country ; the method chosen to effect this was the prac- 
tical abolition of outdoor relief and the consolidation of 
parishes into " unions " for purposes of administration."^ 
Three commissioners were appointed to oversee the opera- 
tion of the act throughout England and Wales generally, to 
make yearly reports of the working of the new system, to 
appoint minor officials, to issue instructions for the guid- 
ance of the local poor law authorities, and to order unions 
formed and workhouses built. Each parish in the union 

^ 4 and 5 William IV, c. 76. 

* 43 Eliz., c. 2. 

* Rose, The Rise of Democracy (London, 1897), P- 54- 

* Hansard, 3d series, vol. xlviii, p. 806. 

5 The New Poor Law is described in G. Nicholls, History of the Eng- 
lish Poor Law, 2 vols. (London, 1898), vol. ii, pp. 272-81. 



303] CHARTISM AS A CLASS MOVEMENT 55 

was liable for the support of its own poor, but aid was ex- 
tended through the medium of the union. Migration of 
labor was encouraged, in place of the penalization of the 
old Law of Settlement devised to prevent parishes from 
shifting their burdens onto each other. Two justices were 
allowed to except persons unable to work from the require- 
ment of residence in the workhouse imposed upon other 
paupers. The regulations issued by the new commissioners 
to the boards of guardians forbade relief to all persons in 
employment, relief in money allowance to able-bodied 
workers, payments of house rent and outdoor relief gen- 
erally, except in cases of urgent necessity, to persons from 
sixteen to sixty. ^ Within the imions paupers were separated 
into seven classes : aged or infirm men, men and youths 
over thirteen, boys from seven to thirteen, aged and infirm 
women, women and girls over sixteen, girls from seven to 
sixteen, and children under seven. ^ Even relatives were 
separated under this plan and allowed to meet only under 
restrictions. Paupers could not leave the workhouse even 
to go to church without going through all the formalities 
of readmission on their return.* 

The success of the New Poor Law from the standpoint 
of its authors was great and immediate. In the year end- 
ing Lady-day, 1834, the last year before the change of 
system took place, £6,317,255 was spent for the relief of 
the poor, an amount equal to 8s. 9/^d. per capita of the 
population of England and Wales.* The next year the 
sum had fallen to £5,526,418, or 7s. 7d. per capita; while 
in 1836-37 it was only £4,044,741, or 5s. 5d. per capita. 
Afterwards the hard times increased the cost of poor relief 

1 Nicholls, op. cit., p. 298. *Ibid., p. 301. 

* Nicholls, History of the English Poor Law, op. cit., pp. 31 1-2. 

* Parliamentary Papers, 185a (1461), xxiii, i et seq. 



^6 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [304 

somewhat, but never quite to the old level throughout the 
entire period of Chartist agitation. Such stringent limita- 
tion of public charity, however, could not but attract criti- 
cism from many quarters. It was charged in Parliament 
in 1838 that Assistant Commissioner Kaye had declared 
that the intention of the authorities was " to make the 
workhouses as like prisons as possible, and to make them as 
uncomfortable as possible ", in order to terrorize British 
workingmen from seeking relief.^ Fortunately for the 
popular acceptance of the law it was passed during a period 
of industrial expansion which permitted rural laborers to 
find work in the industrial towns of the midland and the 
north. ^ But, nevertheless, the first effect of the change was 
to force many of the aged or infirm agricultural laborers 
into the workhouses of the unions,^ and also, apparently, 
to increase the labor of women and children in the rural 
districts.* With the coming of hard times in 1837 the 
workmen in the towns felt the rigor of the new system, 
and, both in town and in country, meetings of protest were 
held. Richard Oastler, of Yorkshire, and in Lancashire 
the Reverend Joseph Raynor Stephens, a Wesleyan min- 
ister, counseled resistance to the enforcement of the law. 
At Newcastle, on New Year's Day, 1838, Stephens told 
his hearers that rather than have the law continued he would 
prefer to see Newcastle " one blaze of fire with only one 
way to put it out, and that with the blood of all who sup- 
ported this abominable measure ".'^ 

The Chartists found powerful allies outside their own 

1 Hansard, 3d series, vol. xli, p. 1014. 

*W. Hasbach, History of the English Agricultural Labourer (Lon- 
don, 1908), p. 220. 
' Ibid., p. 219. 

* Ibid., p. 225. 

* Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement, pp. 55-9. 



305] CHARTISM AS A CLASS MOVEMENT 57 

ranks in their struggle with the New Poor Law. The ad- 
herents of factory reform, including the Tory Democrats 
and the London Times, protested against the severity of 
the law; partly, no doubt, from a genuine sympathy with 
the poor, but partly because it was carried by a Whig min- 
istry and a reformed Parliament. No one could forget the 
exclamation of William Cobbett at the friendly reception 
accorded to the hated measure by the House of Commons, 
" Thank God ! The country still possessed a House of 
Lords ; and while that tribunal existed the poor man had no 
reason to despair of justice." ^ The Poor Law Amend- 
ment Act passed the House of Lords without much diffi- 
culty, but Cobbett's words were partly justified by a formal 
protest printed by some of the Lords declaring the measure 
" unjust and cruel to the poor ".^ The members of the re- 
formed Parliament, such as Attwood and O'Connor, who 
afterwards sympathized with Chartism, joined with Cob- 
bett to oppose the Bill in all its stages. Attwood, at a later 
period, declared the New Poor Law " more odious than any 
measure which had been passed since the Norman Con- 
quest." * But the leaders of both the Liberal and the Con- 
servative parties steadily opposed all attempts to reopen the 
questions which it was hoped that the law of 1834 had 
settled. 

To the Chartists, the New Poor Law was not only a 
grievance but a breach of faith. They had come to look 
upon the outdoor relief granted for so many generations 
not as a charity to be extended or withdrawn at the whim of 
a legislature in which they had no representation, but as 
one of the historic rights of the English laborer. Cobbett 

^ Hansard, 3d series, vol. xxiv, p. 387. 
' Ibid., vol. XXV, p. 1098. 
2 Ihid., vol. xlix, p. 223. 



58 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [306 

had declared that everyone ought to know " that the right 
of the English poor to relief in cases of indigence was as 
sound and as good a right as that of any gentleman or 
nobleman to the possession of his lands." ^ This exactly 
corresponded with the view expressed seven years later by 
one of the Chartists: 

I would undertake to prove that the poor had a better right 
to such parochial relief as the old Act of Elizabeth provided, 
than the landlord has to his conquered estate or the grinding 
shopocrat to his fraud-begotten profits. . . I would go further 
and prove that the legislature had no more right (except the 
right of force) to pass such an act as the amendment act 
(without giving the paupers and labouring classes compensa- 
tion) than it had to rifle the silversmiths of London of their 
plate to make coin of it.^ 

The workers suspected in the policy of the government a 
capitalist plot to drive them to accept cheap labor by cutting 
off their old alternative of poor relief.* They also criti- 
cized the meager dietary of the union workhouses, compar- 
ing the pauper allowance with the payments to " national 
out-door paupers " such as the royal family; * and they de- 
nounced the segregation of husbands and wives as a viola- 
tion of the law of God. The emphatic attitude of the 
Chartists on the question of poor relief is well illustrated 
by their petition of 1842, in which they take occasion to 
denounce as " contrary to all previous statutes, opposed to 
the spirit of the constitution, and an actual violation of the 
Christian religion " 

1 Hansard, 3d series, vol. xxiii, p. 1336. 

^ McDouaU's Chartist and Republican Journal, Aug. 21, 1841. 
' Tildsley, Die Entstehung der CJiartistenbewegung, p. 27, 
* The New Black List, cited in Dierlamm, Die Flugschriftenliteratur 
der Chartistenhewegung, p. 23. 



307] CHARTISM AS A CLASS MOVEMENT 59 

the determination of your honourable House to continue the 
Poor-law Bill in operation, notwithstanding the many proofs 
which have been afforded by sad experience of the unconsti- 
tutional principle of the bill, of its unchristian character, and 
of the cruel and murderous effects produced upon the wages of 
working men, and the lives of the subjects of this realm.^ 

The Chartist movement, if it did not take name and form 
until three or four years after the Poor Law Amendment 
Act was passed, synchronized exactly with the hard times 
which caused the law to be felt as a great grievance, and, 
in its earlier years, drew most of its attacks on existing con- 
ditions from the complaints of those who suffered from 
the restrictions of the new system. If one cause was 
more important than any other in detaching the working 
classes who followed the Chartist banner from the general 
forces of Radicalism with which they had previously been 
associated, it was this Act and the defense of it by Radicals. 
How complete the alienation of the two classes was, and 
what bitterness it engendered, can be shown from J. Bron- 
terre O'Brien's characterization of the conduct of the re- 
formed Parliament and his estimate of the motives of its 
leaders : 

What was the first act of that Reformed Parliament? The 
Coercion Bill for Ireland. What was the last act of the first 
session? The New Poor Law for England. Why did that 
base Parliament pass both these acts? To place the laboring 
classes of both countries at the feet of the rich assassins, who 
rob, brutalize, and enslave the populations of both. It is in 
the nature of things that the middle classes must be worse 
than any other part of the community.^ 



2 



* Hansard, 3d series, vol. Ixii, pp. 1376-81. 

^McDouall's Chartist and Republican Journal, July 3i> 1841. 



CHAPTER II 
The High Tide of Chartism 

The strength of the Chartist movement at different times 
is not easy to measure, for, hke most popular agitations, 
it had periods of intense activity varied by intervals of 
comparative quiescence. On at least three occasions the 
movement showed sufficient strength to alarm the govern- 
ment and the conservative public. The first phase of the 
agitation culminated in the attack by an armed band of 
Chartists under John Frost and other leaders; the second 
in the wholesale strikes in the manufacturing districts of 
Lancashire and other northern counties in the summer of 
1842 ; the third in the demonstration of April 10, 1848, when 
London was garrisoned by a special anny of police con- 
stables to prevent disorder in connection with the presenta- 
tion of the Chartist petition to Parliament. It need not 
be assumed that the real strength of the movement was 
greatest on these three occasions, but unquestionably it was 
then most evident. Each of these periods coincided with a 
more or less serious industrial crisis, just as the whole 
movement fell in a period of general industrial depression. 

The strength of the movement in 1839 is evidenced by the 
great petition of that year, which boasted 1,280,000 signa- 
tures, collected in more than five hundred public meetings 
held in 214 towns and villages of Great Britain.^ The 
degree of public interest in Chartism revealed by this num- 

1 Hansard, 3d series, vol. xlviii, p. 223. 
5o [308 



309] THE HIGH TIDE OF CHARTISM 6 1 

ber of signatures was remarkable, for, after making all 
reasonable deductions for fraudulent signatures and the 
signatures of those who, as women, would not be enfran- 
chised by the Charter, it is probable that the petition repre- 
sented a far more numerous constituency than did the House 
of Commons which refused to consider it/ But the two 
years following 1839 were marked by comparative inactiv- 
ity, due in part no doubt to the prosecutions instituted by 
the government consequent upon the disorders of that year. 
The Annual Register records that, in the earlier part of 
1841, "the hopes or apprehensions of the public were no 
longer excited by the prospect of any further extension of 
political rights; the outcry for the ballot, or an enlargement 
of the suffrage, had almost ceased." ^ But as winter ap- 
proached, agitation became intense and meetings were held 
throughout Great Britain to collect signatures for another 
great National Petition, demanding the six points of the 
Charter and repeal of the legislative union with Ireland, and 
setting forth a long list of popular grievances which seemed 
to the petitioners to justify their demands. 

The monster petition of 1839 was completely eclipsed 
by the size of the one presented in 1842. This petition 
was signed by 3,315,752 persons,® showing an increase of 
nearly 160 per cent over the support accorded to the Chartist 
cause in 1839. Thomas Duncombe presented it to the 
House of Commons on May 2, 1842, and on the following 
day the question of its reception was debated at great length. 
In spite of the support of many of the Radicals, the request 
for a hearing was denied by a majority of 238.* It seemed 

1 Cf. supra, p. 21. 

' Annual Register, vol. Ixxxiii, p. 2. 

' Morning Herald, cited in Hansard, 3d series, vol. Ixiii, p. 29. 

* Hansard, 3d series, vol. Ixiii, pp. 13-91, gives the text of the debate. 



62 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [310 

evident that the Chartists could not by mere petitioning, 
no matter in what numbers, win any of their demands from 
the government. Whigs and Tories alike remained un- 
converted by the demonstration, and the Times spoke the 
mind of the conservative portion of the British public when 
it declared editorially that the size of the petition was quite 
irrelevant: 

We are content with the more simple belief that the great 
question to be settled by the House of Commons, and by every- 
one else who has either authority or influence over the course 
of legislation, is not how the people shall be fully represented, 
but how they shall be well governed ; that governments do not 
rest on the consent of the people, but simply on their own 
established existence — that the powers that he have a claim 
upon our allegiance because they are.^ 

The distribution of the signatures to the petition of 1842 
shows very clearly in what parts of the nation Chartism 
was strongest.^ London with its suburbs, contributed about 
200,000, Manchester nearly half as many (99,680), New- 
castle and its suburbs about 92,000 or only a little fewer 
than Manchester, other factory towns very much in propor- 
tion to population. The country districts of Yorkshire 
and Lancashire contributed their share, but the Chartists as 
a whole were shown to be distinctly an urban class. Scot- 
land was strongly Chartist, at least in the manufacturing 
districts. Glasgow and Lanarkshire produced 78,062 signa- 
tures. Throughout Great Britain over four hundred towns 
or villages were represented by signatures to the petition. 
The number of Chartist " locals " had grown with surpris- 
ing rapidity. Northampton had nearly a dozen Chartist 

^ Times, May 3, 1842, italics in the original. 

' For the signatures to the petition by localities, see Hansard, 3d 
series, vol. Ixii, p. 1375. 



31 1 ] THE HIGH TIDE OF CHARTISM 63 

associations in 1842, whereas in 1839 it had only two or 
three; ^ South Lancashire had eleven such organizations in 
1840, and forty-five in 1842.' Of course not all the sup- 
porters of the petition were in the strictest sense active 
members of the Chartist party, but Buncombe estimated 
that " nearly 100,000 adults of the industrious portion of 
the community lay aside one penny per week of their wages 
for the purpose of carrying on and keeping up agitation in 
favor of their claim to the elective franchise." ^ 

During the winter of 1841-2 the rise of Chartist agitation 
was paralleled by the increasing misery of the working 
classes. In spite of the efforts of the Poor Law commis- 
sioners to reduce pauperism by stringent work-house regula- 
tions, the amount expended for the poor increased annually 
from a minimum per capita rate of 5s. 5d. in the year 1836-7 
to 6s. i^d. in 1841-2 and 6s. 5^4 d. in 1842-3.* The per- 
centage of the population of England and Wales in receipt 
of poor relief rose to nine and one-half in the year 1842-3.^ 
A study of the condition of the poor in individual districts 
shows the same degree of destitution that is indicated by 
the poor-rate for the country as a whole. In Stockport, 
during the year 1842, eight shillings were paid for poor 
relief to every potmd paid in rental.® In Leeds, accord- 
ing to the London Sun "' mien were trying to support them- 
selves on ii^d. per week. A private survey of 1003 work- 

^ Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement, p. 213. 
" English Chartist Circular, vol. ii, p. 95. 

* Hansard, 3d series, vol. Ixiii, p. 20. 
^Parliamentary Papers, 1852 (1461), xxiii, i et seq. 

* Nicholls, History of the English Poor Law, vol. ii, p. 390. 

* Engels, Condition of the Working Class, p. 87. 

''Cited in Lester, Condition and Fate of England (New York, 1842''. 
vol. ii, p. 39. 



64 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [312 

ingmen's families at Bolton-le-Moors in December, 1841, 
showed an average of less than is. 2;^d. per head per week 
for food, clothing and all other expenses except rent/ 
More than half of these families had goods in pawn. In 
Paisley fifteen thousand persons were in receipt of poor 
relief." In the woolen districts of Wiltshire the indepen- 
dent laborer received less than two-thirds the minimum sup- 
port accorded to paupers in the workhouses.^ 

Indirect evidence of the poverty of the country is afforded 
by a study of the statistics of emigration and of marriage. 
The number of emigrants from the United Kingdom in- 
creased from only 33,222 in 1838 tO' 118,592 in 1841 and 
128,344 in 1842.* The number of marriages suffered a 
steady decline from 1589 per 100,000 in 1839 to 1473 i'^ 
1842.^ The significance of the decrease in the proportion 
of marriages is well expressed in the report : " The number 
of marriages in a nation perhaps fluctuates independently 
of external causes, but it is a fair deduction from the facts, 
that the marriage returns in England point out periods of 
prosperity, present in part, but future, expected, anticipated, 
in still greater part." " If this contention is sound, then 
from 1839 to 1842 the mass of the people were increasingly 
apprehensive of future want. 

Parliament and the ministry of Sir Robert Peel were far 
from indifferent to the extent of the distress in the manu- 
facturing districts. Even the royal address, which is al- 
ways the most optimistic and conservative of sources for 

^ Hansard, 3d series, vol. Ix, p. 259. 

* Ibid., p. 178. 

' Martineau, History of the Thirty Years' Peace, vol. iv, pp. iSS-6. 

* Nicholls, op. cit., p. 439. 

'^Parliamentary Papers, 1847-8 (967), xxv, i et seq., p. v. 
'Ibid., p. xxiii. 



313] THE HIGH TIDE OF CHARTISM 65 

the economic condition of the United Ivingdom/ stated in 
February that Her Majesty had " observed with deep 
regret the continued distress in the manufacturing districts 
of the country," and added that the " sufferings and priva- 
tions which have resulted from it have been borne with 
exemplary patience and fortitude." - In May a formal letter 
was sent by order of Her Majesty to His Grace the Arch- 
bishop of Canterbury, recommending, in view of the fact 
that " many of the Working Classes have suffered and con- 
tinue to suffer, severe distress," that " the Ministers in each 
parish do effectually excite the parishioners to a liberal con- 
tribution, which shall be collected the week following at 
their respective dwellings by the Churchwardens or Over- 
seers of the Poor in each Parish." ^ Beyond the extension 
of poor relief and the admonitions already mentioned to 
the rich to be " liberal " and to the poor to endure their 
want with " patience and fortitude ", the government did 
little to relieve the situation, although Sir Robert Peel de- 
cided that the time was ripe to make a slight revision of the 
Corn Laws with a view to checking speculation in food- 
stuffs, and also to make up a heavy deficit in the revenue 
by the imposition of an income tax of seven pence in the 
pound. This income tax was at first intended to be levied 
for three years only, but it has been one of the sources of 
British revenue ever since. 

The revision of the duties on grain * was also chiefly 
important in its relation to the future. It involved 

' This is, obviously, because the address represents the views of the 
ministry, whose policies would be held responsible for unusually hard 
times. 

' Annual Register, vol. Ixxxiv, p. 4. 

'Parliamentary Papers, 1842 (383), xxvii, 57-8. 

* By the 5 and 6 Vict., c. 14. 



66 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [314 

comparatively little change and it bitterly disappointed 
the free-traders in Parliament, but it was the begin- 
ning of the premier's concessions to the Anti-Corn Law 
League. A comparison of the new wheat schedule with 
the old will show something of the scope of the meas- 
ure. The principle of both laws was the sliding scale, that 
is, as grain advanced in price in England the duty upon im- 
ported grain was decreased. Under the old rate when wheat 
sold at less than sixty shillings the quarter a duty of twenty- 
seven shillings was imposed on each quarter. For each 
additional shilling in price the duty was lessened one shill- 
ing until at sixty-seven shillings it was fixed at twenty shill- 
ings and eightpence. Above this point, the duty was les- 
sened more rapidly, so that when wheat sold for seventy- 
three shillings, the duty was only twO' shillings and eight- 
pence. If wheat sold for more than seventy-three shillings 
a flat rate of one shilling the quarter was imposed. By the 
new law the variation in the sliding scale was made more 
gradual. A duty of twenty shillings was imposed when 
wheat was less than fifty-one shillings the quarter, a nine- 
teen shillings duty if from fifty-one to fifty-two shillings 
the quarter, an eighteen shillings duty if from fifty-two to 
fifty-five shillings the quarter, and from this point tO' six:ty- 
six shillings the quarter the duty lessened by one shilling 
for each rise in price of equal amount. The duty was again 
uniform for prices from sixty-six to sixty-nine shillings the 
quarter, and then decreased more gradually till the price 
stood at seventy-three shillings, above which point the old 
one-shilling duty was retained. 

As the summer in 1842 approached, discontent became 
keener and its expression more violent. On June fifth a 
meeting was held on Enfield Moor near Blackburn at which 
many appeared with firearms, and Marsden of Bolton 
threatened an armed deputation to Buckingham Palace to 



315] THE HIGH TIDE OF CHARTISM 67 

obtain the Charter/ But the great strike in August, which 
was later " captured " by the Chartists and turned to politi- 
cal purposes, began as a simple protest against wage reduc- 
tions. The nailers near Wolverhampton had their wages 
reduced by ten per cent and were, in addition, employed 
only on a half-time basis." Similar conditions existed in 
the collieries, where a strike or " turnout " followed upon 
a reduction in wages of threepence a day.* In the neigh- 
borhood of the Tyne the ship carpenters struck when their 
pay was reduced early in August to twenty-one shillings a 
week.* On the fourth and fifth of August a great strike 
of spinners and weavers began at Ashton.^ During the fol- 
lowing ^veek armed mobs invaded Manchester and the other 
big factory towns.® Wherever they went they " turned 
out " the operatives, forcing even those who wished to re- 
main at work to join them, put out the fires of steam engines, 
drew plugs from the boilers, and intimidated the authorities. 
Estimates in the Times placed the number of men thrown 
out of work by the great turn-out as from fifty to eighty 
thousand.'^ Serious riots occurred at Stockport, at Preston 
and in Staffordshire, but on the whole the strike, consider- 
ing its extent, was remarkably orderly. A typical report, 
from Rochdale on the fifteenth of August, states that " a 
few boys have threatened and begged and entered some 
shops, but they have been reproved by the men." ^ The 

* Annual Register, vol. Lxxxiv, pt. ii, p. 102. 
' Times, July 28, 1842. 

* Ibid., Aug. I, 1842. 

* Ihid., Aug. 9, 1842. '. 
^Annual Register, op. cit., p. 133 et seq. ' ■ 

* Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement, pp. 217-25. 
'' Times, Aug. 12, 1842, 

^ Ibid., Aug. 17, 1842. 



68 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [316 

textile operatives on the twenty-fifth of the month published 
a list of their demands, which included a wages schedule 
similar to that existing in 1840, a ten-hour day " or less," 
the employment of men as well as women and children in 
the weaving department, and weekly payments of wages/ 

This industrial movement was quickly turned by the 
Chartists into a political demonstration. As early as the 
seventh of August a mass meeting on Mottram Moor had 
resolved not to end the strike until the Charter was won.^ 
Three hundred and fifty-eight labor delegates, chiefly from 
the manufacturing districts of Lancashire and the West Rid- 
ing of Yorkshire, met in Manchester on the twelfth, and 
three hundred and twenty of them voted to continue the 
turnout until the Charter was the law of the land.^ It was 
further resolved to make the strike general throughout the 
country. The executive committee of the National Chart- 
ist Association issued a formal proclamation to the striking 
workers on August sixteenth, as follows: 

Peace, law, and order have prevailed on our side ; let them be 
revered until your brethren in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, 
are informed of your resolution; and when a universal holiday 
prevails — which will be the case in eight days — then of what 
use will bayonets be against public opinion? . . . Our ma- 
chinery is all arranged, and your cause will in three days be 
impelled onward by all the intellect we can summon to its aid. 
Therefore whilst you are peaceful, be firm ; whilst you are or- 
derly, make all be so likewise ; and whilst you look to the law, 
remember that you had no voice in making it, and are there- 
fore slaves to the will, the law, and the price of your masters. 
All ofBcers of the Association are called upon to aid and assist 

>■ Times, Aug. 26, 1842. 
' Gammage, op. cit., p. 217. 
» Ibid., p. 218. 



317] THE HIGH TIDE OF CHARTISM 69 

in the peaceful extension of the movement, and to forward all 
moneys for the use of the delegates who may be expressed 
over the country.^ 

It is evident from the tone of the proclamation that the 
Chartists were determined not to let such an exceptional 
opportunity as the great turnout afforded fail through any 
ill-timed violence. Feargus O'Connor made this plain in 
a public letter, in the course of which he advised : " Let no 
blood be shed. Let no life be destroyed. Let no property 
be consumed. Let us, in God's name, set an example to the 
world of what moral power is capable of effecting." " 

In the latter part of August and throughout September 
the striking workingmen returned, either without gaining 
their aims or else compromising on local arrangements with 
their employers. Before the end of September, the Stock- 
port Chronicle reported that the whole of the turnout opera- 
tives had returned to work.^ Four of the members of the 
Chartist executive were arrested, because the address to the 
striking workingmen issued by the National Chartist As- 
sociation was regarded as treasonable.'* McDouall, who 
was probably its author, received warning in time and 
escaped to France. O'Connor was among the leaders ap- 
prehended by the authorities. As a final result of the 
special commission in Staffordshire, fifty-four persons were 
sentenced to transportation, eleven of these for life, the 
rest for more than seven years; while 154 were sentenced 
to various terms of imprisonment.^ The vigorous official 
action after the political strike had subsided contrasts 

* Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement, pp. 218-9. 

* Times, Aug. 22, 1842. 

' Cited in the Times, Sept. 29, 1842, 

* Gammage, op. cit., pp. 228-31. 

* Annual Register, vol. Ixxxiv, pt. ii, p. 163. 



^Q THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [318 

strongly with the inactivity of the authorities during its 
course. To be sure, the government sent troops and artillery 
to the manufacturing districts and a royal proclamation, 
dated August 13, 1842, offered indemnity and a reward 
of fifty pounds to informers/ But both the local magis- 
trates and the military commanders seemed to feel that so 
long as the strikers refrained from the destruction of life 
and property it was better to permit them to stop the mills. 
Complaints of this inactivity, such as the following report 
from Bury, were not infrequent: 

Notwithstanding the promise of the magistrates to give the 
millowners protection, the mob was not interfered with either 
by the police or the military, though there were no soldiers 
in the place; and notice had been given to the magistrates of 
the approach of the mob. No damage was committed by the 
mob which entered Bury ; and, after effecting their purpose of 
stopping the mills, proceeded on to Bolton.^ 

The failure of the turnout of August 1842 to obtain 
either the Charter or the desired wages schedules, seems to 
have been due to two main causes. In the first place, a bad 
time was chosen, after a prolonged industrial depression 
when the strikers were practically without reserve funds to 
support themselves for any length of time and when em- 
ployers were laying men off or working them only part 
time. Indeed, many Conservatives believed that the sur- 
prising weakness shown by the magistrates in the north of 
England in dealing with the turnouts was due to the fact 
that many of them were Whigs and free-traders who were 
not at all sorry to see a big political demonstration which 
would embarrass Sir Robert Peel's government and make it 
difficult to refuse the popular clamor for cheaper corn. 

* Times, Aug. 15, 1842. ^ Ibid., Aug. 20, 1842. 



319] THE HIGH TIDE OF CHARTISM yi 

Early in 1842 Cobden had suggested a refusal of taxes and 
Bright a general closure of factories as possible means of 
coercing the government/ The manufacturers, who could 
hope at best for little profit in such a year, were willing to 
let their mills and factories be closed for a few weeks, and 
they knew that the scanty resources of the strikers would 
hardly permit them to prolong the turnout for a greater 
length of time. Many of the workingmen realized this, 
and their consequent half-heartedness was the other import- 
ant source of weakness to the strike. The Times cleverly 
compared the striking Chartists to any army of five hun- 
dred, drawn up in hollow square around 4500 prisoners, 
claiming to be a force of five thousand.^ Some of the 
strikers desired only the restoration of the old wages, others 
did not wish to strike at all and did so only from coercion. 
The fact that the strikers had to go in large bands from 
mill to mill forcing the operatives to leave their work, shows 
that many would rather have remained as they were. The 
majority of British workingmen would willingly have sub- 
scribed to the principles of the Chartists, but only a minority 
of them would ever have endangered their livelihood in 
such a doubtful enterprise as a general strike for manhood 
sufii'rage. As a demonstration the turnout was not in reality 
a failure, for it showed the strength and numbers of the 
discontented as they had never been shown before. The 
Stockport Chronicle gave as its opinion that never before in 
history had there been " a cessation of labor so extensive, 
simultaneous, and protracted," ^ while the Times reported 
that never since Chartism became known had it been so 
completely organized.* 

^ G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London, 1914) , pp. 76-78. 

2 Times, Aug. 22, 1842. 

* Cited in the Times, Sept. 29, 1842. * Times, Aug. 12, 1842. 



72 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [320 

During a large part of the year 1842 the Chartist cause 
was much strengthened by the prospect of a good under- 
standing with some of the middle-class Radicals. In Feb- 
ruary one petition combined a demand for Corn Law repeal 
with that for the Charter/ In April a conference was ar- 
ranged at Birmingham between the Chartists and a middle- 
class organization for " complete suffrage " led by the Rev. 
Joseph Sturge.^ Among the Chartists who attended were 
Lovett, Collins, Vincent and O'Brien. The Chartists 
throughout the first day's session were inclined to suspect 
the sincerity of their new allies, but, as the representatives 
of the Complete Suffrage Association accepted one after 
another of the six points, their enthusiasm increased until 
on the second day (April 6, 1842) O'Brien volunteered the 
information that he " had never been in any society, com- 
posed even exclusively of working men, in which he had 
found the democratic spirit more thoroughly developed." ^ 
Not all of the points of the Charter were carried without 
discussion. Some of the Complete Suffrage representa- 
tives doubted the value of annual Parliaments,* of the ballot 
and of the payment of members of the House of Commons 
by the state. The absolute denunciation of the physical 
force party and its methods called out some protest by the 
Chartists,^ and O'Brien objected particularly to the attack 
on the " Feargusites " or follovv^ers of Feargus O'Connor.® 

^ Engels, Condition of the Working Class in 1844, p. 231. 

^ Report of the Proceedings at the Conference of Delegates of the 
Middle and Working Classes, held at Birmingham, April 5, 1842, and 
three following days (London, 1842). 

=* Ibid., p. 38. 

* The Rev. T. Spencer made the interesting suggestion of the recall 
as a possible substitute for annual Parliaments. Report of the Bir- 
mingham Conference, p. 17. 

^ Ibid., p. 7. « Ibid., p. 11. 



32 1 ] THE HIGH TIDE OF CHARTISM 73 

But the two factions in the conference reached substantial 
agreement upon all questions of aim and policy until the 
question of the name of the new organization arose/ 
Lovett and the other Chartists insisted that, having adopted 
all the points of the Charter, the conference should adopt 
the name as well; the Complete Suffragists wished some 
other name to be chosen, regarding the old term as too much 
associated with the physical- force methods of the past. The 
delegates could reach nO' agreement upon the point, and 
wisely determined to let the question remain unsettled until 
December. Some practical rules and methods of action 
were provisionally agreed upon, the conference adjourned,^ 
and the Chartists for the first and last time entered upon a 
campaign with a considerable middle-class support. 

The friendship subsisting between the Sturgeites and the 
Chartists bore valuable fruit in the Parliamentary contests 
of the summer. Joseph Sturge appeared as a candidate for 
the borough of Nottingham in August. Vincent, Cooper, 
O'Connor and " great numbers of operatives . . brought 
in by the Chartist leaders from the neighboring villages, 
and from more distant towns " " gathered to support his 
candidacy. Both O'Connor and Vincent made speeches 
in support of his nomination.'^ Sturge's opponent, a Air. 
Walter, who based his campaign chiefly upon his opposition 
to the new Poor Law, was returned over Sturge by the 
narrow margin of eighty-four votes. ^ At Southampton ® 

1 Report of the Birmingham Conference, p. 55. 

* It may be noted, parenthetically, that a reading of the report of the 
Conference leaves one with the irresistible impression that the debates 
recorded therein compare favorably in quality with the Parliamentary 
debates recorded in Hansard. 

3 Times, Aug. 4, 1842. ■* Times, Aug. 5, 1842. 

5 Walter, 1885; Sturge, 1801. Times, Aug. 8, 1842. 

* Ibid., Aug. 9, 1842. 



74 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [322 

and Ipswich ^ Chartist candidates polled heavy votes, and 
at several elections the Chartists showed their real strength 
among the unenfranchised by attending the polls in a body 
and electing their candidates on the first show of hands, 
although the official returns, of course, took no account of 
these demonstrations. But in October the Chartists won a 
positive, though small, success in electing sixteen police 
commissioners out of seventy-two in the town of Dundee.^ 
In 1 84 1 they had been able to elect only seven. 

In September Joseph Sturge suggested a basis for the 
second conference between the Complete Suffrage party and 
the Chartists.^ He proposed that electors and non-electors 
should return equal numbers of delegates, that the smaller 
towns should have two representatives apiece, the more 
considerable boroughs (of five thousand and upwards popu- 
lation) four apiece, while such important centers of radical 
activity as London, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, 
Edinburgh and Glasgow, should each have six. His plan 
was adopted, and Sturge himself was unanimously chosen 
to preside over the conference when it met in Birmingham 
on December 27, 1842.* Letters were read from W. 
Sharman Crawford, M. P. and Daniel O'Connell. Both 
expressed their approval of the Charter, but both declined 
to enter the Conference — Sharman Crawford because he 
could be of more service to the democratic cause as an 
independent friend of the Chartists in Parliament than as a 
member of the party, while O'Connell held aloof because of 

1 Times, Aug. 17, 1842. 

' Memoranda of the Chartist Agitation in Dundee (anonymous, un- 
dated), p. 66. 

' English Chartist Circular, vol. ii, p. 128. 

^ Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement, pp. 241-5 ; Times, 
Dec. 28, 1842. 



323] ^^^ ///GH TIDE OF CHARTISM 75 

the violence and narrowness of the "physical-force" faction.^ 
T. Beggs, a Nottingham delegate, presented a series of 
resolutions providing that the conference endorse the " six 
points " ; favor " such means only for obtaining the legis- 
lative recognition of them as are of a strictly just, peace- 
ful, legal, and constitutional character " ; refuse to consider 
irrelevant matters; and, while ready to consider any docu- 
ment laid before it, take as the basis for discussion the Bill 
of Rights prepared by the council of the National Complete 
Suffrage Union. ^ 

The Chartists at once attacked the last proposal and 
William Lovett moved to substitute the Charter as the basis 
for discussion. The two measures were substantially iden- 
tical, as both parties to the conference admitted, but there 
was an absolute deadlock over the term " Chartist." 
Lovett, as leader of the Chartist faction at the conference, 
proposed in the interest of harmony that both bills be with- 
drawn or both be considered clause by clause.^ But all at- 
tempts at conciliation failed, and Lovett's original motion 
carried by the decisive majority of 193 to 94. Thereupon 
Joseph Sturge resigned the chair and many of the Complete 
Suffragists, including the ex-Chartist leader Henry Vincent, 
seceded. The two bodies then met separately, transacted 
necessary business, and adjourned on the thirtieth.* Meet- 
ing separately, the Chartists passed a resolution condemning 
the conduct of the Sturgeites in abandoning the Conference. 

On the face of it, the conference had split over nothing. 
Sturgeites and O'Connorites quite agreed as to political prin- 
ciples and there was no irreconcilable difference upon ques- 

^ Times, Dec. 29, 1842. 
» Ibid. 

* Wm. Lovett, Life and Struggles in Pursuit of Bread, Knowledge, 
and Freedom (London, 1876), p. 284. 

* Times, Jan. 2, 1843. 



76 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [324 

tions of detail and of party tactics. But the two organiza- 
tions were unable tO' fuse because of the class antipathy latent 
in the ranks of each. As one of the delegates, Mr. Hey- 
worth of Liverpool, correctly phrased the issue : " the fact 
was the present contest was for ' who' shall be your lead- 
ers?'"^ We have testimony from both Chartists^ and 
Complete Suffragists^ that the unwillingness of the latter 
to take any part in an organization in which O'Connor and 
his disciples were powerful was the real cause of the schism. 
The Complete Suffrage party wished that the new organi- 
zation should abandon the Chartist name because of the 
traditions of violence and class antagonism with which it 
was associated, accept middle-class leadership and progress 
along the lines of constitutional agitation in friendship and 
alliance with the Anti-Corn Law League. The Chartists, 
as we have seen, had a very different conception of the form 
and purpose of their propaganda. They desired a party 
organized and led by workingmen and directed ultimately 
to social and economic ends through the medium of the 
Charter. They did not refuse an alliance with the middle- 
class Radicals, but the)^ were unwilling to make any con- 
cession, even of name, to maintain it, because they had an 
ingrained distrust of their new allies and viewed every 
divergence on their part from the strictest party orthodoxy 
as an attempt tO' betray the democratic cause. Moreover, 
the Charter for which they had struggled for so many 
years, had acquired a sentimental value in their eyes, and 
they could not consent to abandon the name even to secure 
its substance. It meant to them all that the word " Social- 
ist " means to many a radical workingman today. 

^ Times, Dec. 30, 1842. 

' Lovett, op. cit., p. 285. 

* Henry iRichard, Memoirs of Joseph Sturge (1864), p. 318. 



325] THE HIGH TIDE OF CHARTISM jj 

But both Chartists and Complete Suffragists realized the 
injurious effect of the broken conference at Birmingham 
upon their future efforts. Thomas Cooper gave as his 
opinion : " That Birmingham Conference ruined the pros- 
pects of Chartists; and the Complete Suffrage party never 
made any headway in the country." ^ It is true that Joseph 
Sturge continued the struggle for a few years, but with- 
out success, as his organization was now divorced from 
those sources of popular enthusiasm which alone could 
have then effected such a sweeping political reform as he 
desired. In 1844 he contested the borough of Birmingham 
on a manhood suffrage platform, but received only 350 
votes. ^ He remained an advocate of manhood suffrage but 
turned his attention more and more to the anti-slavery 
movement and to peace propaganda. For the Chartists, 
the conference marked not only the end of the middle-class 
alliance, but the beginning of the dissolution of the party 
itself into contending and jealous factions wasting their 
best efforts in thwarting each other's activities. 



' Life of Thomas Cooper, p. 228. 
* Richard, op. cit., pp. 320-322. 



CHAPTER III 

The Disintegration of the Chartist Movement 

Another long period of discouragement and inactivity 
followed the failure of the political strike and the Birming- 
ham conference. So little interest was taken in the affairs 
of the party that the next Chartist convention, summoned 
originally for April 1843, did not meet until the fifth of 
September/ This convention, unlike the conference of the 
previous year, contained none but strict Chartists and the 
only prominent leaders present were adherents of Feargus 
O'Connor. O'Connor's ascendancy within the party, due 
in part to his own striking personality and in part to the 
hopes aroused by his plan for resettling the town laborers 
upon the land, was further confirmed by the dependent posi- 
tion in which the newly elected executive found itself. 
O'Connor had up to that time refused to serve on the execu- 
tive at all, and had even proposed to limit its power by 
the clumsy device of a council of thirteen, chosen by public 
meetings, to act as a check on the executive, audit its ac- 
counts and countersign its public documents.^ But O'Connor 
as a member of that body found a surer method of controll- 
ing it through its failure to get adequate financial support 
from the public. The National Chartist Association was 
so poor that it could not pay the salaries of the nine lecturers 
appointed by the executive, or even of the executive officials 

^ Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement, p. 248. 
^ Ibid., p. 247. 

78 [326 



327] DISINTEGRATION OF THE MOVEMENT yg 

who appointed them.^ O'Connor made up these recurrent 
deficits by loans from his considerable private fortune. 

In March 1843 Feargus O'Connor and fifty-eight other 
persons were indicted on nine different counts in connection 
with the great Lancashire strike.^ Twenty-one were ac- 
quitted by the jury, seven dismissed in the course of the 
trial, sixteen found guilty on the fourth count and fifteen 
on the fifth. But the accused conducted their cases with 
marked ability, and the whole proceedings were finally 
quashed on the technical ground that the indictments did 
not specify the locality of the alleged offences. O'Connor's 
reprint of the case ^ was dedicated to Justice Baron Rolfe, 
who presided over the trials and showed marked considera- 
tion to the accused. Thomas Cooper was not, however, so 
fortunate as O'Connor. Acquitted of the charge of arson, 
he was rearrested on the charge of sedition and received a 
sentence of two years' imprisonment.* While Cooper was 
in prison he improved his time by writing his most famous 
poem, The Purgatory of Suicides, a work that introduced 
him to the literary public and to many of the most dis- 
tinguished British authors, including Charles Kingsley."^ 

The triumphant acquittal of O'Connor, and the im- 
prisonment or exile of a number of Chartists who might 
have been his rivals for party leadership, left him in 
a position of unusual strength. Nevertheless, O'Con- 

1 Gammage, op. cit., p. 251. 

2 Ihid., pp. 231-41. 

* Trial of Feargus O'Connor and Fifty-eight others at Lancaster 
(1843). 

*■ Gammage, op. cit., p. 240. 

' It has been asserted that Thomas Cooper was the original of "Alton 
Locke" in Kingsley's novel of that name, and that the dictatorial and 
eccentric journahst "O'Flynn" was drawn from the character of 
Feargus O'Connor. Cf. Dierlamm, Die Flugschriftenliteratur der Char- 
tistenbewegung, p. 100. 



8o . THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [328 

nor suffered one serious setback during the years of 
his leadership. The Anti-Corn Law League was very- 
active during the crisis of 1842 and the years which 
followed, and O'Connor, as leader of the Chartists 
and opponent of the theory of free trade, felt obliged to 
send a challenge to its leaders for a debate on the question 
of repeal. At last he and two other Chartists, Harrison 
and McGrath, met Bright and Cobden in a public debate 
at Northampton on August 5, 1844.^ O'Connor was a 
brilliant orator but a somewhat inconclusive debater and 
the Chartists themselves admitted that the honors of the 
occasion were wholly with the League. Gammage even 
went so far as to describe the debate as the greatest victory 
the League ever obtained. It was a severe blow to the 
prestige of the Chartists and especially of 'their leader. 

Neither the Chartists nor the Anti-Corn Law League won 
many I'ecruits for twO' or three years after the stormy days 
of 1842. But the Chartists suffered much more than the 
League since they lacked the financial resources necessary 
to keep their propaganda alive during a period of com- 
parative public indifference. The most important of Chart- 
ist publications, O'Connor's Northern Star, proved a heavy 
drain on the fortune of its publisher, and was transferred 
from Leeds to London in the hope of improving its cir- 
culation.^ At the very time when the best efforts of every 
Chartist were needed to rouse the country, the party was 
torn by internal dissensions and revolts against the dictator- 
ship assumed by O'Connor. It was wholly unprepared to 
meet with united strength the next great opportunity for 
successful agitation. 

The quarrel with the Anti-Corn Law League and 

* Gammage, op. cit., pp. 253-5. 
" Life of Thomas Cooper, p. 271. 



329] DISINTEGRATION OF THE MOVEMENT 81 

with the Complete Suffragists under Joseph Sturge was un- 
fortunate enough, for it effectually prevented any such 
union between the working classes and the powerful Radical 
party which triumphed over the aristocracy in 1832. But 
even as a purely proletarian organization Chartism might 
have accomplished much if its various elements had been 
able to work harmoniously. At no one time, however, 
were all the Chartist leaders in substantial agreement as to 
the proper aims and methods of the party. Even in the 
summer of 1842, when the Chartist factions were most 
nearly united and an agreement with the middle-class Radi- 
cals seemed not beyond the reach of hope, riots occurred 
between the followers of O'Connor and those of Joseph 
Raynor Stephens, the opponent of the New Poor Law, over 
the nomination of Sturge for the borough of Nottingham.^ 
The first wedge that split the united movement was the 
conflict between Feargus O'Connor and William Lovett. 
The London Working Men's Association adopted a resolu- 
tion to include in their active membership only those who 
were themselves of the working class. It was charged that 
the sole purpose of this action was to exclude O'Connor, 
who was a rather wealthy landowner and boasted descent 
from the ancient kings of Ireland." In return, the educa- 
tional and social reforms advocated by Lovett were at- 
tacked by O'Connor on the ground that they confused the 
plain issue of the Charter with other questions such as popu- 
lar education and the temperance movement. In the pages 
of the Northern Star O'Connor dubbed his opponents 
" knowledge Chartists." ^ Lovett admitted that he had been 
accused of trying " to make teetotalism another point in 

' Times, Aug. 4, 1842, 

* Gammage, op. cit., p. 13. ^ , j 

3 Ibid., pp. 195-7. 



82 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [330 

the Charter." ^ In 1843 Lovett refused to accept office 
in the National Charter Association because he found it 
impossible to work in harmony with O'Connor. 

Other secessions quickly followed. McDouall returned 
from France to Scotland in 1845. O^ his return he sug- 
gested the formation of a separate Chartist organization 
for Scotland, but O'Connor promptly attacked this proposal 
as an attempt to break the unity of the movement.^ 
O'Connor managed to retain an autocratic control over the 
National Charter Association, but the Association did not 
succeed in gaining complete control of the movement. 
Many Chartist locals refused entirely to- submit themselves 
to the guidance of the national organization.^ Even 
O'Connor's intimate disciples were readily alienated by his 
jealousy of other leaders of the movement. Thomas 
Cooper, for example, had been O'Connor's most ardent 
lieutenant. His followers had even taken part in breaking 
up the public meetings held by J. Bronterre O'Brien and 
Joseph Sturge at a time when O'Connor opposed any alli- 
ance between Chartists and Complete Suffragists.* But 
when Cooper had finished his term of imprisonment for his 
share in the riotous demonstrations of 1842 he discovered 
that O'Connor had published an attack upon him, and from 
that time forth he refused to have anything to do with his 
old leader.® 

The Chartist division most frequently mentioned, at least 
in secondary sources, was that between the leaders who' re- 
lied upon " moral force " to accomplish their aims, and those 

^ English Chartist Circular, vol. i, p. 9. 

* Gammage, op. cit., pp. 258-60. 

' Schliiter, Die Chartistenbewegung, p. 219. 

* Gammage, op. cit., pp. 202-5. 

' Life of Thomas Cooper, p. 271. 



33 1 ] DISINTEGRATION OF THE MOVEMENT 83 

who trusted to " physical force." Lovett was the recog- 
nized champion of the former faction. The moral force 
Chartists believed that they could carry the Charter by means 
of public meetings, agitation, petitions and direct or indirect 
influence at the polls. The physical force Chartists held 
that sooner or later an armed insurrection would be neces- 
sary to force the government to yield. O'Connor was usu- 
ally classed with this latter group, but not altogether justly. 
In 1839, to be sure, he was a man of violent counsels, but 
in the crises of 1842 and 1848 he advised moderation.^ The 
Nonconformist, the organ of the Complete Suffrage As- 
sociation, claimed him as an adherent of the moral force 
section of the Chartists.^ His friend Julian Harney of the 
Northern Star stood somewhat more consistently for the 
methods of physical force, and Stephens during his early 
crusade against the New Poor Law was completely a re- 
volutionist. 

But it is easy to exaggerate the importance of this division 
between the moral force and the physical force sections of 
the party. There was, as a matter of fact, nO' clear line 
of demarcation between the two types of method or between 
the men who inclined to one or the other. The Chartist 
convention of 1839 suggested many measures which did not 
involve armed revolt and yet can hardly be considered as 
exercising purely " moral force." The general strike was 
one of these proposals; others were abstinence from excis- 
able articles, exclusive dealing with Chartist tradesmen, and 
a run on the banks. ^ It is largely a matter of definition 
whether we count an enforced turnout, such as that in 
August 1842, a physical force measure or not. Moreover, 

1 Cf. supra, p. 69; infra, p. 99. 

2 The Nonconformist, June 8, 1842. 
^ Gammage, op. cit., p. 109. 



84 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [332 

Chartists held various positions on the subject at various 
times. Thomas Cooper, for example, was almost as in- 
consistent as O'Connor. In 1842 he stirred the Stafford- 
shire potteries districts into open revolt — although no doubt 
the strikers went much further than he intended that they 
should — and was sentenced to two year's imprisonment for 
his part in the affair. In 1846 he moved the following 
resolution : 

That the Convention deplores the acts of violence which have 
filled the public mind with an aversion to Chartism, and hereby 
records its abandonment and disavowal of the doctrine of 
physical force, and its resolve to seek the establishment of the 
People's Charter as a statute of the realm solely by peaceable, 
moral, and constitutional means.^ 

The true importance of the dispute between moral force 
and physical force sections of the party, was not that this 
was an especially serious cause of friction or that it classi- 
fied Chartists into distinct camps. It may be considered 
rather as a symptom of schism than a cause of it. The real 
difficulty was that at no time could the party agree upon 
any definite plan of action. The same tendencies to moder- 
ation or to violence existed in 1839 as in 1848 or even later; 
the first cause of quarrel, the quarrel about methods of 
agitation, was born with Chartism and did not end until the 
movement, too, had disappeared. A far more acute and 
bitter dispute raged over the land plan oif Feargus O'Connor. 

O'Connor, discouraged at the slow progress of Chartist 
agitation, decided to create a National Land Company for 
the purpose of purchasing private estates and dividing them 
into peasant holdings. He had always favored an agricul- 
tural rather than an industrial basis as the proper founda- 
tion for a free society, and he found in his position of 

1 Gammage, op. cit., p. 275. 



333] DISINTEGRATION OF THE MOVEMENT 85 

leadership in the Chartist party a great opportunity to real- 
ize this favorite dream. He thought, too, that the interest 
in his great agrarian experiment would in turn react upon 
the fortunes of the Chartist movement and reawaken inter- 
est in it and in his newspaper. Briefly, the plan was as 
follows.^ Whoever desired a holding would buy a certain 
number of shares in the Company and pay cash down 
£1 6s. for each share (as the rate was fixed in the first cir- 
cular),^ and among the subscribers a certain number would 
be chosen by ballot for the first chance at a farm.^ Those 
fortunate enough to win the right to immediate possession 
would be settled by the Company 011 holdings prepared and 
fitted for occupancy and receive a small loan of money 
besides to start them on their new undertaking. For each 
share they had subscribed they would receive one acre of 
land and £7 los. advance. Upon them would rest the obli- 
gation to repay to the Company the value of the land and 
cottage, and the money advanced, the payment taking the 
form of rent, first fixed at 5 per cent per annum.* The 
money so returned to the Company woujid be spent in buy- 
ing up more estates, preparing more soil, building new cot- 
tages, and advancing money to those who were next to be 
settled upon the holdings of the Company. This process 
would continue until all subscribers were established under 
the system as landholders. 

Feargus O'Connor had the Irishman's enthusiasm for 

^ The fullest account of O'Connor's enterprise is in the six Reports 
on the National Land Company, when it underwent Parliamentary in- 
vestigation. Reference must also be made to The Labourer, a period- 
ical edited by O'Connor and Ernest Jones in the interest of the land 
scheme. 

^Parliamentary Papers, 1847-8 (398), xix, i et seq., p. 5. 

3 Ibid., 1847-8 (420), xix, 72 et seq., p. 31. 

* Labourer, vol. iii, p. 57. 



86 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [334 

the small farm. He detested city life and industrial occu- 
pations as essentially artificial and hoped that his plan 
would call the British workingman " back to the land." If 
he were successful in this, he expected the further benefit 
that the manufacturers would be compelled to establish 
a very high scale of wages to induce anyone to stay in 
the manufacturing- towns and work for wages who might 
enjoy independence and prosperity on his own land in the 
country.^ In the Northern Star, January 30, 1847, he 
estimated that three acres would be amply sufficient to sup- 
port a family. Not only could the farmer make a good 
living from a small plot of ground but he need spend but 
little on improvements. O'Connor believed that " spade 
husbandry " paid better than farming with the improved 
agricultural machinery which was coming into use.^ He 
favored also reducing the use of draught animals to a mini- 
mum. On this very economical basis, he thought he might 
be able to locate 24,000 families within five years.* 

The defects of O'Connor's land plan are obvious. He 
never took into consideration the difficulty a town popula- 
tion, many of whom had never lived in the country, would 
have in learning to become agriculturists. He did not, ap- 
parently, realize that if his land plan really worked and 
many estates were purchased it would cause a serious rise 
in the price of land and make future purchases more costly. 
He assumed that land could be bought in unlimited quanti- 
ties at reasonable rates and that every beneficiary of the 
National Land Company would make a successful farmer 
and punctually repay his indebtedness. In spite of the ela- 

* F. O'Connor, A Practical Work on the Management of Small Farms 
(1843), p. 9. 

* Ibid., pp. 39-46. 

' Labourer, vol. i, p. 173. 



335] DISINTEGRATION OF THE MOVEMENT 87 

borate calculations with which he filled The Labourer, few 
persons outside the Chartist movement and not all within 
it believed that prosperous farming was possible on so small 
a scale and with such primitive methods as O'Connor advo- 
cated. These inherent weaknesses in the scheme were made 
worse by O'Connor's carelessness and inaccuracy in all 
financial matters. 

The Land Company was first registered October 24, 
1846.^ O'Connor was the chairman of the board of direc- 
tors, and active also in the Land Bank which he established 
as an auxiliary to his enterprise. The Company was capi- 
talized at £130,000 or 100,000 shares." O'Connor had prac- 
tically a free hand in managing the details of the plan; he 
could purchase land whenever he saw " any eligible offer." ^ 
This provision made it inevitable that the affairs of the 
Company would be inefficiently managed. O'Connor even 
failed to furnish the authorities with the full data required 
by law for the proper registration O'f joint stock companies.* 
The scheme would speedily have collapsed, if its organizer 
had not been as able a promoter as he was incompetent as a 
director. He agitated for his land plan even more ardently 
than he had ever done for the Charter and succeeded in in- 
teresting a sufficient number of his admirers to give the plan 
a good start. On May 24, 1847, the Herringsgate estate, 
near Watford, was opened for settlement under the name 
of O'Connorville, and subscriptions increased to £3,500 
and even £5,000 a week.^ By August. 1847, the land fund 

^Parliamentary Papers, 1847-8 (398), xix, i et seq., p. 3. The ap- 
pendix of the report gives the rules of the company. 

* Ibid., p. 50. 
' Ibid., p. 42. 

* Parliamentary Papers, op. cit., p. 12. 

* Gammage, op. cit., p. 283. 



THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT 



[336 



reached a sum of £50,000.^ Encouraged by the success of 
O'Connorville, O'Connor purchased larger estates and ven- 
tured in September of the same year tO' propose that the 
government take over the National Land Company and re- 
plant an English peasantry on an extensive scale.^ 

The land plan greatly added to the prestige of O'Connor 
among the Chartists, and somewhat to the prestige of 
Chartism among the workingmen. But this advantage was 
much more than counterbalanced by the harmful effect of 
the division of opinion it introduced within the party ranks. 
Many Chartists believed that it was in the highest degree 
harmful to tie a political agitation to the fortunes of a 
commercial enterprise. They remembered how O'Connor 
had read rivals out of the party for trying to saddle the 
Chartist agitation with other reforms in which they had 
an interest, and they accused him in turn with being " no 
longer a ' five point ' Chartist, but a ' five acre ' Chartist." * 
Others, who had no scruples about involving Chartism in en- 
tangling alliances with other issues, none the less opposed 
the land plan either from distrust of O'Connor or from a 
conviction that the attempt to establish a peasant pro- 
prietorship in England was futile or reactionary, 

J. Bronterre O'Brien filled the columns of his National 
Reformer with attacks upon the land plan. He pointed out 
that a class of small landowners would be the best security 
the government could desire for keeping the mass of the 
people conservative. " Every man," he wrote, " who joins 
these land societies is practically enlisting himself on the 
side of the Government against his own order." * As a 

1 Gammage, op. cit., p. 285. 

' Labourer, vol. ii, p. 154, 

^ John Watkins, Impeachment of Feargus O'Connor (1843), p. 20. 

* National Reformer and Manx Weekly Review, Jan. 9, 1847. 



337] DISINTEGRATION OF THE MOVEMENT 89 

substitute for O'Connor's project, he advocated keeping the 
land in the hands of the state, to be let out (not sold) to 
the best advantage of the entire public/ Feargus O'Connor 
retaliated by filHng the Northern Star with denunciations 
of the economic theories of O'Brien — land nationalization 
and a purely symbolic currency.^ The breach was com- 
plete. In 1848, O'Brien said: "I know nothing of Mr. 
O'Connor; I have had nothing to do with him for the last 
six or seven years." ^ 

Thomas Cooper was another formidable opponent of 
O'Connor's project. Not content with denouncing the land 
plan, he threatened to propose a series of resolutions in 
the Chartist convention of 1846 practically reading 
O'Connor out of the party. One of these resolutions read : 
" That this Convention regards Feargus O'Connor as un- 
worthy the confidence of Chartists, and hereby warns 
British working men of the folly and danger of union with 
him," * Ernest Jones threatened Cooper with expulsion 
if he persisted in his attempt to present the resolutions, and 
the next morning Cooper was denied admission.^ This 
high-handed act of exclusion discredited the faction loyal 
to O'Connor more than Cooper's resolutions could have 
done even if the convention had accepted them. 

On the other hand, the supporters of O'Connor were 
wildly enthusiastic and would listen to no criticism. Their 
feeling was well indicated by Ernest Jones's poem on the 
purchase of O'Connorville: 

^National Reformer and Manx Weekly Review, Oct. 3, 1846; cf. 
supra, pp. 42-3. 

* Gammage, op. cit., pp. 260-1, 267-9. 
3 Times, April 10, 1848. 

* Gammage, op. cit., pp. 272-5. 
' Ibid., p. 280. 



90 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [33g 

"Has freedom whispered in his wistful ear, 
''Courage, poor slave! deliverance is near?' 
Oh ! She has breathed a summons sweeter still 
'Come! take your guerdon at O' Connor ville!'" ^ 

It is evident that to men who felt like this a land plan which 
meant immediate release from factory life was more im- 
portant than a Charter which promised the same result in 
the indefinite future. O'Connor replied to his critics by 
appearing before a mass-meeting of his partisans in Man- 
chester to defend his plan and seek a public vindication. 
He told his audience that his enemies had plotted to ruin 
him and even to kill him. " O'Connor tested public con- 
fidence to the utmost," wrote Gammage. " He said, ' I 
have now brought money with me to repay every share- 
holder in Manchester.' (Shouts of ' Nay, but we won't 
have it ! '). ' Well, then, I'll spend it all.' (Cries of ' Do, 
and welcome! ')." ^ No other Chartist leader could claim 
a following as devoted as O'Connor's and so none of the 
abler men of the party could displace him from the leader- 
ship. 

In 1848 the National Land Company began to suffer 
from the mismanagement of O'Connor, the irregularity of 
its organization and the inability of the new farmers to 
make a living from their holdings, and Parliament ordered 
an investigation into its affairs. The Company had indeed 
accomplished something; it had built 250 dwellings and 
four schoolhouses, it had cleared, prepared and planted a 
large part of the purchased land.^ But the Poor Law au- 
thorities had been informed that " all those who occupy the 
Land Company's allotments, with nothing more than the 

^ E. Jones, Chartist Songs and Fugitive Pieces (London, undated), 
p. II. Italics as in the original. 
* Gammage, op. cit., p. 288. 
^Parliamentary Papers, 1847-8 (420), xix, y^ et seq., p. 21. ,{■ 



339] DISINTEGRATION OF THE MOVEMENT 91 

produce of their allotments to depend upon, will fail to 
obtain a living," and the fear was expressed that this con- 
dition might " lead to serious and sudden burthens upon 
the poor's rates of those parishes in which they acquire 
land." ^ The purchases of the company to June, 1848, were 
as follows : ^ 

Estates PurcHas.,. Acreage. ^f «/-',. ^"'^/^^^^^f "" ^^^r 

Herringsgate, near Wat- 
ford 103 March, 1846 . . May, 1846 ^^,344 

Lowbands, near Glouces- 
ter 170 October, 1846. . December, 1846. . 8,560 

Minster Lovell, near Wit- 
ney 297 June, 1847 August, 1847 10,878 

Snig's End, near Glouces- 
ter 268 June, 1847 November. 1847 . 12,200 

Dodford, near Broms- 
grove 280 January, 1848. . May, 1848 10,350 

Mathon, near Worcester. . 500 July, 1847 Not completed . . 15,350 

In the sixth Report on the National Land Company, dated 
Augnst I, 1848, the committee of investigation summarized 
the reasons for putting an end to the operations of the Com- 
pany. Since O'Connor's enterprise bulks so large in the 
later history of the Chartist movement, it may be well to 
cite from this report at some length.^ It found : 

1. That the proposed additional provisions to the Friendly 
Societies' Acts which are incorporated in the Bill, entitled 
"A Bill to alter and amend an Act of the 9th and loth years of 
Her present Majesty, for the Amendment of the Laws relating 
to Friendly Societies," will not include the National Land Com- 
pany within those Acts. 

2. That the National Land Company is not consistent with 
the general principles upon which the Friendly Societies are 
founded. 

'^Parliamentary Papers, 1847-8 (503), xix, 207 et seq., p. 34. 

2 Ibid. (557), xix, 295 et seq., p. 31. 

3 Ihid. (577), xix, 323 et seq. 



92 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [340 

3. That the National Land Company, as at present consti- 
tuted, is an illegal scheme, and will not fulfil the expectations 
held out by the Directors to the Shareholders. 

4. That it appearing to this committee by the evidence of 
several witnesses that the books of the proceedings of the 
National Land Company, as well as the accounts of the Com- 
pany, have been most imperfectly kept, and that the original 
balance-sheets signed by the auditors of the Company have been 
destroyed, and only three of those balance-sheets, for the 
quarters ending the 29th of September and the 25th of Decem- 
ber 1847, and the 25th of March 1848 respectively, have been 
produced; but Mr. Feargus O'Connor having expressed an 
opinion that an impression had gone abroad that the moneys 
subscribed by the National Land Company had been applied 
to his own benefit, this Committee are clearly of the opinion, 
that although the accounts have not been kept with strict regu- 
larity, yet that irregularity has been against Mr. Feargus 
O'Connor, instead of in his favor ; and that it appears by Mr. 
Grey's account there is due to Mr. Feargus O'Connor the sum 
of ^3,298 5s. 3^d., and by Mr. Finlaison's account the sum 
of £3,400. 

5. That considering the great number of persons interested 
in the scheme and the bond fides with which it appears to have 
been carried on, it is the opinion of this committee that powers 
might be granted to the parties concerned, if they shall so 
desire, to wind up the undertaking and so relieve them from 
the penalties to which they may have incautiously subjected 
themselves. 

In September the House of Commons agreed to the re- 
port of the committee, and O'Connor's land plan came to 
an end, and with it his ascendancy in the party. In their 
dismay at the collapse of the project and its disastrous ef- 
fect upon the fortunes of the political movement with which 
it was associated, many Chartists blamed O'Connor unduly. 
Certainly O'Connor was blameworthy for inducing so many 



341 ] DISINTEGRATION OF THE MOVEMENT .^^ 

poor men to venture themselves in such a dubious enter- 
prise by assuring them that failure was impossible. But 
if O'Connor had been deliberately dishonest, if he had in- 
tended the scheme solely as a means to his personal profit, 
the investigating committee would certainly have so re- 
ported. O'Connor was the acknowledged representative of 
Chartism in the House of Commons and was highly unpopu- 
lar with the other members both on account of his personal 
eccentricities and as the leader of a movement, regarded 
ever since the events of the tenth of April as the embodi- 
ment of the revolutionary spirit. The report of the in- 
vestigating committee may be accepted as a complete vindi- 
cation of O'Connor's good faith, though certainly not of 
his good judgment. 

While the Chartist movement was thus distracted by fac- 
tional warfare it was in nO' position to take advantage of the 
outbursts of discontent occurring from time to time among 
the British poor. The events of 1842 had weakened and 
discredited the Chartists but had not put an end to labor 
troubles. Throughout 1843 ^^^ 1^44 there were agrarian 
outrages in many places, culminating in the so-called 
" Rebecca " riots in Wales in which rioters, disguised as 
women, banded together to destroy the toll-gates whose 
exactions they found burdensome.^ In the towns condi- 
tions were as bad. In the Sheffield metal trades, especially in 
the saw works, factories were set on fire or attempts were 
made to blow them up.^ In Monmouthshire the failure of 
an iron works employing more than three thousand men 
resulted in a wide-spread riot.^ In Northumberland and 
Durham the coal miners struck for payment by weight as 

1 Engels, Condition of the Working Class in 1844, p. 271. 

* Ibid., p. 220. 

^ Annual Register, pt. ii. vol. Ixxxv, p. 72. 



94 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [342 

measured on standard scales, half-yearly contracts, aboli- 
tion of the fines system, and employment for not less than 
four days a week.^ By March 31, 1844, the striking min- 
ers numbered 40,000. The strike lasted five months and it 
was put down at last only by evicting striking miners from 
the company cottages. But the Chartists were unable to 
convert these industrial disturbances into political demon- 
strations. The trades unions were more inclined to rely 
upon their own efforts and hoped less from political agi- 
tation. 

By 1846, however, the Chartist movement showed signs 
of renewed activity. A significant sign of this revival was 
the presentation in Parliament, on March 10, 1846, of 249 
petitions, bearing some 1,400,000 signatures in the aggre- 
gate, praying for the release of Frost, Williams, and Jones, 
Chartist leaders condemned for their part in the Monmouth 
insurrection of 1839.^ In 1847 the movement gathered 
to itself still greater strength. O'Connor's land plan was 
in the heyday of its popularity, renewed industrial depres- 
sion seemed to threaten harder times than the dark days of 
1842, and the unrest in Ireland and the Continent encour- 
aged the Chartist leaders to hope for an English revolution. 
In the August elections many Radicals and some Chartists 
stood for the House of Commons. Of the twenty-six 
candidates mentioned by Gammage as in sympathy with 
the principles of the Charter ten were returned : Duncombe 
and Wakley for Finsbury, Sharman Crawford for Roch- 
dale, Muntz and Scholefield for Birmingham, Dr. Bowring 
for Bolton, Col. Thompson for Bradford, George Thomp- 
son for Tower Hamlets, John Williams for Macclesfield, 
and, the greatest triumph of all, Feargus O'Connor for 

^ Engels, op. cit., p. 253. 

* Hansard, 3d series, vol. Ixxxiv, p. 867. 



343] DISINTEGRATION OF THE MOVEMENT 95 

Nottingham.^ Most of the candidates supported by the 
Chartists were not themselves members of the party, but were 
Radicals who favored political democracy; in O'Connor, 
however, the Chartists had secured as a spokesman in the 
House of Commons a man who was not only a Chartist 
without other party affihations, but the most prominent of 
their leaders. The election of O'Connor was important 
also for the reason that he had as an opponent Sir John Cam 
Hobhouse, a member of the Whig ministry, whom he de- 
feated by 1,257 votes to 893.^ Greatly encouraged by this 
victory, the Chartists proceeded to plan a new petition, 
much greater than those which the House of Commons 
had previously rejected, and support it by mass meetings, 
processions and general agitation. They also resolved upon 
another convention of the party to determine what steps 
should be taken in the event of a rejection of the petition 
by Parliament. 

Throughout the winter of 1847-8 the evidences of dis- 
content increased. When the news of the Paris revolt 
reached England at the end of February the Chartists be- 
came at once aggressive. On March 6, 1848, a crowd of some 
ten thousand persons met at Trafalgar Square in defiance 
of the orders of the authorities.^ At the same time trouble 
occurred in Manchester and elsewhere, notably in Glasgow, 
where a bread riot resulted in damage to the amount of fifty 
thousand pounds. Most of the Chartist meetings of 
this period passed resolutions of sympathy with the French 
revolutionists and also with the Irish rebels, who saw in the 
coincidence of bad crops in their own country and the re- 
volutionary outbreaks on the continent an opportunity to= 

^ Gammage, op. cit., pp. 283-5. 

'^Annual Register, vol. Ixxxix, pt. ii, p. 97. 

3 Ibid., vol. xc, pt. ii, pp. 35-7- 



^6 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [344, 

rouse the peasantry to a war for Irish independence. A 
proof of the influence of the French republican movement 
upon the course of the Chartist agitation in 1848 is fur- 
nished by the tone of the Chartist press. Chartist periodi- 
cals openly advocated a British republic as the only 
" thorough remedy " ^ for the evils of the day. No longer 
content with petitioning for the Charter, they threatened 
to establish a separate Parliament of " the outlawed seven- 
eighths " and of " such of the present electors who' shall 
choose to make common cause with the people." ^ They 
defied the government to use the army to coerce such a popu- 
lar assembly by means of the army whose " ranks will be 
filled with Chartists." 

At last on the fourth of April the long-heralded Chartist 
convention met.^ The moral force section of the party 
had almost disappeared; O'Connor, O'Brien, Ernest Jones, 
and G. W. M. Reynolds, the hero of the Trafalgar Square 
riot, were the most prominent delegates tO' the convention, 
and O'Brien resigned on the ninth because he could not 
approve the violent counsels of the majority. Most of the 
time of the convention was taken up with speeches by the 
delegates reciting the poverty existing in the various parts 
of the country and the determination of those whom they 
represented not to endure the rejection of another petition. 
Of forty-seven delegates at least thirty-twO' reported that 
their localities were determined upon revolution if this time 
peaceful measures could not carry the Charter. In case 
of its rejection, the convention resolved to choose a National 
Assembly on April twenty-fifth which should sit until the 
Charter was the law of the land. 

* J. Barker, The Reformer's Almanac, April 15, 1848. 

' W. J. Linton, The Republican (1848), p. 126. ,1 " 

* Gammage, op. cit., pp. 301 et seq. 



345] DISINTEGRATION OF THE MOVEMENT 97 

Feargus O'Connor claimed 5,700,000 signatures for the 
Charter, while Ernest Jones estimated the figure at a round 
six million/ The Chartists planned to carry their petition 
from a mass meeting on Kennington Common to the Houses 
of Parliament accompanied by a vast procession of peti- 
tioners. The prospect of a public petition thus formidably 
supported was enough to alarm conservative sentiment even 
without Chartist threats of what would follow its rejection. 
At a meeting on March twenty-seventh, W. J. Vernon, a 
Chartist speaker, said that " he was for giving the House 
of Commons only one hour to consider whether they would 
grant the Charter ", and Ernest Jones exclaimed : " Before 
heaven, I believe that we stand on the threshold of our 
rights. One step, were it even with an iron heel, and they 
are ours. I conscientiously believe the people are prepared 
to claim the Charter. Then I say — take it; and God de- 
fend the right ! " " 

The Chartists openly announced the date of their intended 
demonstration as the tenth of April. This publicity gave 
the government time to take precautions against any sedi- 
tious uprising which might result from the mass meeting 
or from the subsequent procession. The regular army and 
police were kept as far possible in the background to avoid 
a possible collision, an army of special constables were sworn 
in for service on the tenth of April, and the arrangement 
and management of the forces of law and order were en- 
trusted to the Duke of Wellington. The government re- 
vived for the occasion a long- forgotten statute (the thir- 
teenth of Charles 11) directed " against tumults and dis- 
orders, upon pretence of preparing or presenting public 
petitions or other addresses to His Majesty in the Parlia- 

^ Gammage, op. cit., pp. 315-6. 
* Ibid., p. 299. 



^8 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [346 

ment." ^ This law, which forbade more than ten individuals 
to accompany a petition in person, was revived to prevent 
the threatened march on Parliament. It also prohibited 
the signing of any petition by more than twenty persons, 
but the government deliberately decided to ignore that part 
of the law and to enforce only the section limiting the 
number of petitioners who came in person.^ The govern- 
ment felt that this statute of Charles II could be only a 
makeshift for the occasion, sO' a bill was introduced on April 
seventh, aimed more perhaps at the Irish rebels than at the 
Chartists, making certain seditious acts felonies in both 
Great Britain and Ireland.^ The statute covered the case 
of " any person intending to depose the Queen, or proposing 
to make war against the Queen, or seeking to intimidate or 
overawe both Houses of Parliament, or seeking aid from 
any foreign power to invade the United Kingdom with that 
intent," and so far was a rather liberal law ; for it defined as 
" sedition," punishable like other felonies by transporta- 
tion, many actions that previously had been reckoned as 
" treason," punishable by death. But the act further de- 
clared guilty of sedition not only those who plotted rebellion, 
foreign invasion or coercion of Parliament, but also all who 
might write or " openly or advisedly speak to that effect." 
O'Connor for the Chartists and the Irish, and Hume for 
the Radicals, led the attack upon this clause, which would, 
apparently, make an unguarded political speech punishable 
by a long term of imprisonment or transportation. Their 
opposition was fruitless, however, and the bill speedily be- 
came law. 

On the tenth of April London was garrisoned by some 



1 Annual Register, vol. xc, pt. ii, p. Si- 
' Hansard, 3d series, vol. xcviii, p. 95. 
^ lUd., p. 39. 



347] DISINTEGRATION OF THE MOVEMENT 99 

170,000 special constables, among whom was Louis Napo- 
leon, soon to be President of the French Republic. But 
the Chartists proceeded to organize their great demonstra- 
tion as if nothing had happened. The number that gathered 
on Kennington Common from all parts of the metropolis 
has been variously estimated from 23,000^ to 150,000.^ 
Probably the smaller figure is nearer the truth. Contrary 
to the general expectation, the meeting passed off quietly. 
O'Connor saw that any form of resistance to the authorities 
was out of the question under the circumstances and he 
urged his followers to abandon the projected procession 
to Parliament. His advice was taken and the procession 
never was held. The mass meeting quietly dispersed after 
listening to speeches by O'Connor, Ernest Jones, Julian 
Harney and other agitators, and the petition was sent to 
Parliament in three cabs. But the thought of what might 
have happened if the Chartists had acted up to their bold 
words remained to disturb the minds of conservative citizens 
for some time afterwards. The Duke of Wellington, 
charged with the safety of the city, complained in the House 
of Lords that even the mass meeting had been permitted : 

I do think no great society has ever suffered such a grievance 
as this metropolis has suffered within the last few days from 
the error of this great meeting which was to have consisted, 
it was said, of 200,000 persons. God knows how many 
thousands really did attend; but still the effect was to place 
all the inhabitants of the metropolis under alarm, paralyzing 
all trade and business of every description and driving individ- 
uals to seek for safety by arming themselves for the protection 
of the lives of themselves and of their neighbors, and for the 
security of their property.^ 

^ Annual Register, op. cit., pp. 50-4. 

* Thomas Frost, Forty Years Recollections (London, 1880), p. 139. 

' Hansard, op. cit., p. 71. 



lOO THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [34g 

The excitement in London was echoed in other parts of 
the country, and wherever the Chartists threatened violence 
the authorities forestalled them by elaborate preparation. 
A striking instance of this was afterwards related by W. 
H. Chad wick, an influential Chartist : 

On the loth of April . . . thousands of miners were expected 
to come in the morning to Manchester. When I rose in the 
morning I found cannon planted all about, and the military 
parading with drawn swords. I knew that these thousands of 
men were marching in from Oldham, Rayton, and Shaw, and 
I at once ran " for my life " by Oldham road, and reached a 
place called Draylsden Lane. Here I met thousands of men 
marching in, armed with pikes and other implements of war- 
fare.^ 

Chadwick warned the men of their danger and they dis- 
persed tO' their homes. Here as elsewhere the dreaded 
political outbreak failed to materialize. Those Conserva- 
tive men, who had been so thoroughly alarmed by the pros- 
pect of an English revolution paralleling the French, were 
surprised to find how grossly they had magnified the danger. 
The violent speeches and vast claims of the physical-force 
Chartists and the exaggerated apprehensions of their oppo- 
nents seem alike to have been the result of a false infer- 
ence from French insurrection to English agitation. When 
the march on Parliament was abandoned, the men who had 
feared most from the Chartists became ashamed of their 
panic and even imduly contemptuous of working class agita- 
tion. The monster petition was greeted with shouts of 
relieved laughter on its arrival in the House of Commons. 
On April 13, 1848 the select committee on public peti- 
tions made its report to the House of Commons.^ The 

^ Interview in the Bury Times, Feb. 24, 1894. 
* Hansard, op. cit., p. 285. 



349] DISINTEGRATION OF THE MOVEMENT loi 

committee reported that the number of actual signatures to 
the petition was not over 1,975,496. Of these signatures 
many were in the same handwriting, and others were ob- 
viously fictitious. Queen Victoria, the Duke of Welling- 
ton, Colonel Sibthorp (who made in the Commons an earn- 
est but quite needless denial of his part in the matter), and 
many other persons not hitherto connected with Chartism 
were listed among the petitioners, together with names 
sportively invented for the occasion, such as Punch, Pug- 
nose and the like. O'Connor declared that no committee 
could count the number of signatures on the petition in 
the short space of time that had elapsed since it was pre- 
sented, denied all knowledge of the forgeries, and asserted 
that he could get a Chartist petition signed by many more 
than he had claimed for this one. The committee replied 
to O'Connor's attack upon their veracity and related the 
steps taken to secure a fair count. 

There is no reason to doubt that the number of signatures 
to the Chartist petition was given with approximate correct- 
ness by the committee. Joseph Hume on the following 
February gave the slightly higher estimate of 2,018,000 
and pointed out that more than nine thousand other petitions, 
with a total of 290,559 signatures, also prayed for some 
extension of the franchise.^ On either estimate the number 
of petitioners in 1848 was barely three-fifths of the number 
in 1842, even assuming that the same allowance must be 
made for fraudulent signatures in both cases. No doubt 
the number of signatures was more carefully ascertained 
in 1848 than in the previous year, but even the most con- 
servative papers accepted without serious question the esti- 
mated number in 1842," while the claims advanced by 

* Hansard, 3d series, vol. cii, p. 273. 
2 Cf. supra, p. 61. 



I02 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [350 

O'Connor and Ernest Jones in 1848 seem to have had no 
basis whatever except guess-work. The conclusion is 
irresistible, that six years of agitation had not only won 
nothing for the Chartist cause, but had left it in a weaker 
state than before. In 1848, for the first time, the fact of 
their declining strength was brought home to the mass of 
the Chartists. 

The force of the reaction from the fiasco of the tenth 
of April appeared in the elections to the National Assembly. 
O'Connor opposed its meeting, but his prestige had been 
greatly damaged among the physical force men by his advice 
to his followers to abandon their projected march to Parlia- 
ment, while the moral force men had years before rejected 
his authority. On May i, 1848 the new National Assembly 
met, but the majority of its members were of the moral 
force faction, and all were conscious of the weakness of 
their position.^ The Assembly chose a new executive, con- 
sisting of Ernest Jones, McDouall, McCrae, Kydd and 
Leach, but could not agree upon any definite course of action 
to secure the passage of the Charter in Parliament. Neither 
O'Connor nor O'Brien, the leaders in the party convention 
of April, were chosen to the Assembly. On the thirteenth 
it adjourned without accomplishing anything of import- 
ance. The secretary of the new executive reported in June 
that funds were lacking to carry on the work of the party. ^ 
During the summer O'Connor was discredited yet further 
by the failure of his land plan, and Ernest Jones became 
the virtual leader of the movement for the remaining years 
of its existence. 

The political crisis of 1848 ended in the usual repressive 
measures and trials for sedition. In May there were riots 

^ Gammage, op. cit., pp. 324-30. 

' Northern Star, June 15, 1848, cited in Gammage, p. 336. : 



35i] DISINTEGRATION OF THE MOVEMENT 103 

in Lancashire and Yorkshire, followed by numerous arrests ; 
eighteen Chartists were arrested in Bradford and sixteen in 
Bingley/ On the third of June Ernest Jones and four other 
agitators were locked up on a charge of sedition, and a mass 
meeting was dispersed by several companies of infantry and 
a body of mounted police." The accused Chartists were 
sentenced in July to terms of imprisonment of two years 
or upwards.^ McDouall, arrested at Ashton in July, also 
received a two years' sentence, and further arrests were 
made in Manchester, Greenock, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Lon- 
don and elsewhere.* On the fourteenth of August a mob 
armed with pikes and firearms rose at Ashton and murdered 
a policeman before it could be put down.^ In London the 
police discovered three secret armories prepared by a few 
revolutionary Chartists." As a result of the trials which 
followed in September William Cuffey and three of the 
other leaders were transported for life and fifteen others 
imprisoned, thirteen of them for over two years. The as- 
sizes in Yorkshire, Chester and Liverpool resulted in many 
further sentences to transportation or imprisonment.'' By 
the end of the year 1848 insurrectionary Chartism was fin- 
ally crushed. 

These last riots and disorders had behind them no such 
force of popular approval as the Monmouthshire insur- 
rection in 1839 or the political strike of 1842. They were 
the acts of a small minority who preferred open revolt for 

^ Gammage, op. cit., pp. 333-4. 

' Annual Register, op. cit., p. 80. 

» Ibid., p. 85. "■ I 

* Gammage, op. cit., pp. 336-8. 
^Annual Register, op. cit., p. 103. 

• Gammage, op. cit., pp. 337-41. J' 
"' Ibid., pp. 342-3. ■ 'f: ■' '■'' ' • 



I04 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [352 

the very reason that they were too few to effect anything 
by peaceful agitation. The general public did not take them 
very seriously. According to the Annual Register the sen- 
sational conspiracy trials in London " excited the least pos- 
sible interest in the public." ^ The more pacific activities 
of the party were equally fruitless. The distinctive repre- 
sentative of Chartism in Parliament, Feargus O'Connor, 
seemed completely discouraged by the failure of the two 
plans upon which he had builded his hopes for himself and 
for the party, the Land Company and the monster petition. 
He spoke but rarely and then for the most part on Irish af- 
fairs. Worst of all, from the standpoint of consistent 
Chartists, O'Connor made friendly overtures to the middle- 
class reformers whom he had spent so many years in oppos- 
ing. He welcomed Hume's attempt to win the householder 
franchise ^ and appeared very slow in bringing the Charter 
to the consideration oi the House of Commons in which 
he sat. " Your old friend Feargus," wrote O'Brien in 
1849, " has joined the ranks of the Cobdenites for the 
Cobden budget, and has already won golden honors from 
journals that made a by-word of his name up to last week."* 
On July 3, 1849, O'Connor introduced a motion in favor 
of the principles of the Charter. His own speech was 
moderate and was seconded by Joseph Hume and other 
Radicals, although Lord John Russell and the other rep- 
resentatives of the Whigs and the Conservatives who took 
part in the debate strongly opposed the motion. It was 
voted down by a majority of 224 to 15; those who sup- 
ported it were J. Hume, W. J. Fox, J. Greene, L. Heyworth, 
C. Lushington, Lord Nugent, J. O.'Connell, C. Pearson,. 

* Annual Register, op. cit., pp. 121-2. 

' Gammage, op. cit., p. 349. 

' Power of the Pence, Jan. 27, 1849. 



353] DISINTEGRATION OF THE MOVEMENT 105 

W. Scholefield, H. W. Tancred, Col. Thompson, G. Thomp- 
son, Sir. J, Walmsley and the tellers, Feargus O'Connor 
and W. Sharman Crawford.^ The nature of the vote shows 
that all the years of Chartist agitation had made no im- 
pression upon the House of Commons, but the number who 
attended the debate and voted against O'Connor's motion 
shows as well that the issue of manhood suffrage was still 
a live one. When O'Connor introduced a similar motion 
a year later (July 11, 1850) the House was counted out 
as no quorum was in attendance.^ 

During the years that followed, the principles of the 
Charter lost interest for the Chartists themselves as well as 
for the members of Parliament. A clear sign of this was 
the decline of the party press. As early as December 1848 
an anonymous writer complained that whereas in the days 
of the struggle over the Reform Bill of 1832 " the cheap 
press circulated in many forms, to the tune of many thou- 
sand copies weekly," now the democrats of Great Britain 
were " scarcely able to keep one going." ^ Two months 
later it was asserted that there was " not a single daily news- 
paper in Great Britain of democratic principles; and nearly 
all the papers are worse edited than they were six years 
ago." * On January 3, 1852, the Northern Star, since 1837 
O'Connor's organ, changed hands, and Messrs. Fleming and 
McGowan, the new comers, abandoned the Charter.^ Ernest 
Jones's ably edited little paper, the Notes to the People, 
vainly tried to fill the place once taken by the Northern 
Star as the official organ of the party. In May it was 

^ Hansard, 3d series, vol. cvi, p. 1304. 
' Ibid., vol. cxii, p. 1284. 

* Power of the Pence, Dec. 30, 1848 (the letter is dated December 
iSth). 

* Ihid., Feb. 10, 1849. 

' Gammage, op. cit., p. 380. 



Io6 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [354 

succeeded by the People's Paper, but Jones was compelled 
to solicit funds from loyal Chartists to keep his new ven- 
ture alive, and within three years it went under for the lack 
of such support. 

Under the strain of loss and discouragement, the remnant 
of active Chartists were unable to keep the party organiza- 
tion intact. Before 1848 Chartists had frequently divided 
over questions of tactics or leadership or economic principle, 
but now for the first time responsible leaders suggested an 
abandonment or modification of the Charter itself. W. J. 
Linton expressed the thought of many when he urged the 
abandonment of the movement : 

Chartism has gone down in the whirlpool of its own folly. 
What escapes the wreck? A handful of men clinging yet to 
a forlorn hope, that a Conference among themselves, or a new 
Convention, may reestablish the party: some few believers in 
the impossible, waiting for Opportunity to come back.^ 

To restore the old enthusiasm Linton proposed that the 
democrats of Great Britain form " not merely Chartist, but 
Republican Associations." ^ Many others felt that Chart- 
ism was failing through the insufficiency of its program and 
the timidity of its spirit, and the republicans of the party 
claimed fresh converts to their belief.^ G. J. Harney an- 
nounced in the prospectus of his Democratic Review, that its 
columns would be " open only to men of ' ultra opinions,' 
and * extreme principles ' ".* But this tendency to go be- 
yond the Charter evident in the political programs of the 
later Chartist journalists was rather a sign of increased 

^ The English Republic, Feb. 22, 1851. 
2 Ibid. 

^ The People (1849), vol. i, p. 47. 
■* The Democratic Review, Jnne, 1849. 



355] DISINTEGRATION OF THE MOVEMENT 107 

weakness than of increased strength, for it indicated that 
the movement was falling more and more into the hands of 
a small advanced faction. 

Leaders who abandoned the organized Chartist move- 
ment, disgusted at its inefficiency or unable to work in har- 
mony with its leaders, did not in all cases cease their work 
on behalf of the Charter. In the years immediately follow- 
ing the disastrous demonstration of April 1848, many rival 
organizations were created to further the political and eco- 
nomic principles which had hitherto been embodied in 
Chartism. It is significant that these new organizations 
usually added to their political demands an explicit program 
of social reform. The first of these was the People's 
League, established by William Lovett in May 1848. The 
League declared for the Charter, the reduction of public ex- 
penditure, abolition of customs and excise, and a direct and 
progressive property tax.^ The new society did not pros- 
per. It failed to rally to its cause either the unenfranchised 
masses or the middle-class Radicals and it disbanded in 
September of the following year.^ J. Bronterre O'Brien, 
G. W. M. Reynolds and some other Chartists of a more 
radical type than the organizers of the People's League, 
founded another body, the National Reform League. The 
National Reform League aimed to steer a middle course be- 
tween the purely political Chartists and the Socialists. 
Without claiming that the Charter was an ideal political 
program, O'Brien yet favored it because it had received 
the support of so many democrats that it would be " mis- 
chievous to risk dividing the people by the propounding of 
any fresh scheme." ^ In addition to the Charter, the Na- 

^ Lovett, Life and Struggles, op. cit., p. 335. 
^Ibid., p, 349. 

'J. B, O'Brien, The Rise, Progress and Phases of Human Slavery, 
p. 109. 



Io8 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [356 

tional Reform League advocated the gradual nationaliza- 
tion of all the lands and natural resources in the British 
Empire with due compensation to owners, national loans to 
producers, and a " symbolic " currency based " either on a 
corn or a labor standard." ^ The clearest statement of the 
position of the new organization appeared in O'Brien's 
periodical The Social Reformer: 

The Chartists come the nearest to us; but, as Chartists, they 
go only for one right out of many, and that the least valuable 
of all to an uninformed people, viz. the right of voting for 
members of Parliament. . . . The Socialists, on the other 
hand, by aiming at more than the rights of the people, sacrifice 
the attainable for the unattainable.^ 

The National Reform League, like the People's League, 
failed to take the place which Chartism had filled in the 
affections of the people, and in 1850 O'Brien joined the 
National Regeneration Society, another organization de- 
voted to social reform.^ During the year the party leaders 
endeavored to reunite several organizations, The National 
Charter Association, the National Reform League, the So- 
cial Reform League, the Fraternal Democrats and the 
Trades, into one body, but the attempt was a total failure.* 
With the single exception of the trades unions, which were 
wholly non-political in character, all other reform move- 
ments of the unenfranchised classes shared the declining 
fortunes of Chartism, till in 1853 a radical periodical could 
declare that " there is not on the soil of this country any 
party, or popular organization, willing and competent ta= 

^ The Social Reformer, Oct. 20, 1849. 

* Ihid., Oct. 6, 1849 ; italics as in the original. 

' Gammage, op. cit., p. 352. 

*Ibid., pp. 356-8. 



357] DISINTEGRATION OF THE MOVEMENT 109 

continue the struggle for the triumph of pure unsullied 
democracy." ^ 

Feargus O'Connor, discredited by the fiasco of 1848, al- 
lowed his lieutenant Ernest Jones to dominate the Chartist 
movement for the few remaining years of its existence. 
Ernest Jones never openly quarreled with O'Connor, who 
had befriended him when in prison, but he attacked the edi- 
tors of the Northern Star and attempted indirectly to under- 
mine what was left of O'Connor's influence.^ He ruled 
the party as autocratically as had O'Connor and was equally 
successful in promoting division within the ranks. While 
he denounced the men who were leaving the movement to 
join other reform organizations, he sadly confessed that 
" the party of true Chartists that remains is too small to turn 
the tide." ^ Certainly he did but little to increase it. In his 
Notes to the People he attacked unsparingly the middle- 
class reformers, the trades-unions, the co-operative move- 
ment and the admirers of Louis Kossuth, then the favorite 
of British democrats.* Further secession marked every 
year of his leadership. In 1850 Thomas Clark broke with 
the party and founded a rival organization, the National 
Charter League.^ This brought down upon him the furious 
denunciation of the party regulars. G. J. Harney deserted 
the Northern Star, with which he had been associated for 
many years, and devoted many columns of his new organ 
the Democratic Review, to fiery attacks upon Clark and 
O'Connor, whom he pilloried as the twin traitors who had 
tried to wreck the movement.^ But Ernest Jones could 

^ The Vanguard, Feb. 12, 1853. 
2 Cf. infra, pp. 151-2. 
' Notes to the People, p. 727, 
* Cf. infra, p. 201. 
' Gammage, op. cit., p. 353. 
• Democratic Review, June, 1850. 



no THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [358 

not profit by this new attack upon the deserters from the 
party because he himself had quarreled with Harney.^ 

In spite of daily desertions and intra-party quarrels, 
Ernest Jones did not despair of the ultimate triumph of 
Chartism. He believed that if the party were but purged 
of its weaker members and reorganized on a more efficient 
plan it would soon recover all and more than all its former 
strength. He induced the Chartist convention of 185 1 to 
adopt a series of resolutions which amounted to a com- 
plete program of social reform of a radically socialistic 
character.^ This attempt to inject new life into the mori- 
bund movement was rather coldly received. The English 
Republic commented on the efforts of the convention of 
185 1 : "Your new revival of Chartism . . . must fail for 
three good and sufficient reasons, i. You have no party 
to appeal to. 2. You have noi principle round which to 
form a party. 3. You have no plan of action." ^ The 
truth of these strictures was so undeniable that Ernest Jones 
set himself to remodel the party machinery as he had al- 
ready remodeled the party policies. 

Ernest Jones was a member of the party executive in the 
years 185 1 and 1852. At this time, the executive was an 
unpaid board of nine members, several of whom took very 
little interest in the work of the party. " I am heartsick," 
wrote Jones, " of sitting Wednesday after Wednesday with 
members insufficient to form a quorum; or, when suffi- 
cient, doing nothing in the world's greatest and dearest 
cause ... I am heartsick of seeing opportunity after op- 
portunity lost because the executive are minding other mat- 
ters instead of minding the Charter." * He advocated as 

1 Gammage, op. cit., pp. 283-5. ^ Ibid., p. 39. 

^ The English Republic, May 22, 1851. 
* Notes to the People, p. 582. 



359] DISINTEGRATION OF THE MOVEMENT m 

a remedy the reduction of the executive to a well-paid and 
permanent board of three. In 1852 he withdrew from the 
executive as a protest against its inefficiency ^ and two of 
his friends, J. Bezer and J. Shaw followed his example. 
Of the six members who remained at least four sympathized 
strongly with the middle-class reformers ^ — which accounts 
perhaps for their indifference to the Chartist agitation. 
The next conference, which met in Manchester May 17, 
1852, adopted the reorganization plan of Ernest Jones, and 
he was chosen, together with R. G. Gammage and J. Finlen, 
on the new executive of three.^ The decision of the con- 
vention of 1 85 1 to stand aloof from all other parties, neither 
favoring nor opposing them, was confirmed by the program 
of 1852. The party still resolved: 

that since by each and all of the franchise measures now 
before the people (excepting that embodied in the Charter) 
the middle-class would gain far more votes than the working- 
class, which would place the latter in a more powerless position 
than at present, the Charter must be agitated for in its entirety.* 

While Ernest Jones labored heroically to keep the Chart- 
ist movement from vanishing into a mere vague democratic 
sentiment, another able Chartist leader was working to the 
same end. Thomas Cooper, who described himself in 1849 
as " a Chartist, though not a member of any Chartist as- 
sociation," ^ took a renewed interest in the affairs of the 
party after Feargus O'Connor ceased to control it. He 
urged a new type of tactics, the individual petition, hold- 

1 Notes to the People, pp. 743-4. 
' Gammage, op. cit., pp. 384-5. 
^ Ibid., p. 386. 

* Notes to the People, p. 1032. 

* Plain Speaker, June 23, 1849. 



112 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [360 

ing that monster petitions could never succeed after the 
failure of 1848.^ He deplored the growing tendency to 
accept something less than the full Charter, and protested 
against " our divisions, as ' Four,' ' Five,' or ' Six Point ' 
men." ^ But he was far from occupying the uncompromis- 
ing position of Ernest Jones. He divided his time between 
the Chartist movement and a projected " Progress Union " 
for general social amelioration, one of the short-lived 
reform movements so numerous during the latter years of 
Chartism, and this divided allegiance was of course an 
offence in the eyes of the orthodox. Moreover, while him- 
self unwilling to work for anything less than manhood 
suffrage, Cooper did not regard the middle-class reform 
movement for household suffrage as inimical tO' the cause 
of full democracy. " If," he wrote, " a powerful section 
of the present electors can be brought to unite for the en- 
franchisement of three and a half millions^ — and will join 
with their demand ' the abolition of the Property Qualifica- 
tion' — I wish them success." ^ Such sentiments seemed no 
less than treasonable to the more class-conscious Chartists, 
and Ernest Jones refused to allow Cooper to take any share 
in the work of the Chartist party organization.* 

Not a few Chartists openly advocated the abandonment of 
five points of the Charter in order that all democrats in 
Great Britain might concentrate their efforts upon the most 
important issue, manhood suffrage, and a distinct manhood 
suffrage movement was launched in 1852.^ It was pointed 
out that the narrow insistence upon each of the six points 

1 Plain Speaker, June 16, 1849. 

* Cooper's Journal, Jan. 17, 1850. 
' Plain Speaker, June 2, 1849. 

* Gammage, op. cit., p. 401. 

^ The English Republic, ¥tb.S,'i^S2. ; 



361] DISINTEGRATION OF THE MOVEMENT 113 

had alienated many who were not opposed to a full extension 
of the suffrage.^ Many hoped for a revival of the old 
alliance between the Parliamentary Radicals and the leaders 
of the working class. A most remarkable expression of this 
sentiment appeared in 1852 when a working class paper, 
friendly to Chartism, said : " That the principles of Chartism 
continue to spread we believe, but little thanks are due to 
an Ernest Jones and a Feargus O'Connor for it . . . the 
consummation will be brought about rather by the quiet, 
moderate and subtle tactics of such leaders as Hume, 
Cobden, and Walmsley." ^ As might be expected, this edi- 
torial expression of opinion called forth several letters of 
protest from the readers of the paper, but it is at least 
significant that any Chartist faction should be willing that 
the democratic movements should be directed wholly by 
middle-class leaders and wholly by middle-class methods. 
It is probably safe tO' say that such an editorial could not 
have appeared in any working class paper at any time within 
fifteen or twenty years after the days of the Reform Bill 
agitation. 

The indifference of the country to the attempt of the 
Chartist organization to recover lost ground was complete. 
Ernest Jones summarized the political situation well when 
he wrote in January 1852 : 

" In the Midland, nothing is doing. 

In Scotland — no sign of union. 

In the West, an ocean of Democracy, but not a breeze on its surface." ^ 

We are fortunate enough to have a barometer of the de- 
clining strength of the movement in the number of votes 
cast at various times for the party executive. In the elec- 

^ The Northern Tribune, Aug. 20, 1854. 

^ The Weekly Advertiser and Artisan's Companion, March 29, 1852. 

^ Notes to the People, p. 765. 



114 ^^^ DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [362 

tions of 185 1 the highest of the nine successful candidates 
received 1,805 votes, the lowest 709.^ For the year 1852 
the corresponding figures were 900 and 336.^ After the 
number of the executive had been reduced to three, the lead- 
ing candidate had 922 votes and the third man 739, or 
over a thousand less than the candidate third in order 
of popularity had received three years before.^ In the last 
election, for the year 1853, the leading candidate received 
942 votes, the third man chosen only 520.* This last 
executive consisted of E. Jones, J. Finlen and J. Shaw, 
all representatives of the one narrow faction which was the 
remainder oi the great Chartist movement after successive 
subtractions of the other leaders of the party. The execu- 
tive was hampered by lack of funds and accomplished noth- 
ing. In the year 1854 none was chosen.^ 

Here we may put a period to the history of the Chartist 
movement, although Ernest Jones, faithful to the end, con- 
tinued to lecture on behalf of the Charter^ and did not 
finally cease his propaganda till 1858.^ But a leader with- 
out followers is not a movement. 

^ Gammage, op. cit., p. 358. 

* Ibid., p. 380. 

^ Ibid., p. 391. 

*Ibid., p. 397- 

' Ibid., p. 401. 

« E. Jones, Evenings with the People (1856-7) ; published lectures. 

' Schluter, Die Chartistenbewegung, pp. 343-4- 



CHAPTER IV 

The Improvement in the Condition of the Work- 
ing Class after 1842 

Since the ultimate aim of the Chartist leaders was 
economic legislation in the interests of the hitherto un- 
represented classes, and since it was the economic griev- 
ances of the British artisans which provided them with 
the bulk of their following, it is hard to see how there 
could have been a real and permanent decline in the 
movement if the economic condition of England had 
remained as it was in 1842. Of course the correspond- 
ence of Chartist agitation with the varying intensity of 
poverty can only be traced in the broadest and most 
general fashion. Our data for the condition of the peo- 
ple during the period of Chartist activity is not only 
scanty in comparison with the source materials for 
later decades when the importance of exact and com- 
parable statistics in this field was more fully recognized, 
but such material as there is was collected for special and 
immediate purposes. Thus the Parliamentary Reports 
contain very valuable statements as to the wages of 
factory hands, miners, hand-loom weavers, and a few 
other classes of wage-earners at various periods in vari- 
ous places. But it would be hopeless to look in this 
mass of material for definite annual statements of the 
trend of wages. The data furnished are the findings of 
special commissions appointed to investigate the labor 
conditions of one class of workers at one particular time 
363] 115 



Il6 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [364 

and, usually, in one particular place or district. For 
many parts of the country for many years together there 
may be an absence of source material almost complete ; 
for other times and places the necessary data may be 
given in a wholly satisfactory form, except for the fact 
that there is no similar data for other years with which 
to compare it. 

Even if there were the most exact statistics at hand 
for wages, prices and unemployment for every part of 
Great Britain and for every month and week of the period 
under consideration, it would matter little to the present 
investigation, since there would still be lacking any defi- 
nite measure of so intangible a thing as a popular agita- 
tion. The probable number of signatures to each of the 
three great petitions furnishes almost all the statistical 
evidence there is of Chartist strength and weakness. 
The number, activity and circulation of the Chartist 
periodicals — so far as this can be ascertained, — the votes 
cast in elections within the organization, the activity of 
the party at Parliamentary elections, the number of 
prosecutions for sedition, the estimated size of mass 
meetings : all such evidence, however useful to confirm 
a general impression, is of necessity too vague and im- 
perfect to make it possible to establish a mathematical 
correlation between economic misery and political dis- 
content. It will be enough for our present purpose to 
ask and answer two questions : was there in the years 
following 1842 a change for the better in the condition 
of those classes who furnished the rank and file of the 
Chartist party suf^ciently marked to throw any light on 
the unexpected weakness of the party in 1848? and was 
there such a further development in their welfare in the 
years following 1848 as to explain the impossibility of 
reviving Chartist agitation after that time, as it had twice 



365] THE WORKING CLASS AFTER 1842 n^ 

been revived after the failures of 1839 and of 1842? If 
the answer to either of these questions is in the negative, 
the dechne of the Chartist movement must have been 
due to other than economic causes; if the answer to 
both is in the affirmative, it is at least highly probable 
that the chief cause of the decline of Chartism was the 
partial disappearance of those economic grievances which 
had made and shaped the movement. 

There is abundant evidence that during the years from 
1842 to 1846 Great Britain rallied from the hard times 
which coincided with the greatest strength of Chartism. 
One measure of this is the real or declared value of the 
exports of British and Irish produce and manufactures. 
For the five-year period 1836-40 this value averaged 
£50,012,994 per annum; for 1841 it was £51,634,623 ; for 
1842, £47,381,023, or less than in any year since 1837.^ 
In 1843 export values reached £52,279,709; in 1844, 
£58,584,292; in 1845, £60,111,082, a total not reached 
again until 1849. This rapid expansion of trade was 
accompanied by an equally important development of 
manufacturing. Leonard Horner, inspector of factories, 
reported the building of 524 new factories within his 
jurisdiction from 1842 to 1845.^ Another indication of 
recovery was the decline in the number of bankruptcies 
and insolvencies listed in the Annual Register. These 
increased from 1084 in 1838 to 2120 in 1842. In 1843 
there were 1632; in 1844, 1333; in 1845, i274- ^^^e 
state of the national finances showed a similar improve- 
ment. A deficit of nearly four million pounds in 18423 
was converted into a surplus of £1,443,304 in 1843; o^ 
£3,356,105 in 1844, and of £3,817,642 in 1845.'' The 

^Parliamentary Papers, 1866 (509) Ixvi, 717 et seq. 

^Dolleans, Le Chartisnte, vol. ii, p. 311. 

* £Z,979,iZ9- ^Parliamentary Papers, 1851 (in 140) xxxi, 163 et seq. 



IlS THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [366 

total national debt, funded and unfunded, declined from 
£791,757,816 in 1842 to £782,977,684 by 1846; the 
interest and other annual charges from £29,300,112 to 
£28,025,253/ The language of the royal addresses be- 
came increasingly jubilant. As early as August, 1842, 
the government noted " indications of gradual recovery 
from that depression which has affected many branches 
of manufacturing industry";^ in 1844, an "increased 
demand for labour" ;3 in February, 1845, increased 
activity in " almost every branch of manufacture " and 
*' a spirit of loyalty and cheerful obedience to the law " ',* 
in January, 1846, "the prosperous state of the revenue, 
the increased demand for labour, and the general im- 
provement which has taken place in the internal condition 
of the country." ^ The value of the testimony of the 
royal addresses as to the state of the country is, of 
course, largely negative, indicating little more than the 
absence of an undeniable depression, but we have con- 
firmatory evidence from the leaders of the opposition. 
Lord Brougham gave it as his opinion on July 11, 1842, 
that " the present distress of the country is without a 
parallel " and that all former hard times " present com- 
paratively an aspect of prosperity."^ On February 4, 
1845, he compared the condition of the country with that 
of two or three years before ; " a contrast more remark- 
able between the state of the manufacturing classes then 
and their present condition there cannot be." ^ Lord 
John Russell admitted in the Commons that there had 
been " a gratifying improvement in the state of manu- 
factures." ^ 

^ Parliamentary Papers, 1857-8 (443) xxxiii, 165 et seq. 

^ Annual Register, vol. Ixxxiv, p. 231. ^Ibid., vol. Ixxxvi, p. 3- 

*Ibid., vol. Ixxxvii, p. 2. ^ Ibid., vol. Ixxxviii, p. 5. 

^Hansard, 3rd series, vol. Ixiv, p. 1242. 

"^ Ibid., vol. Ixxvii, p. 26. ^ Ibid., p. 74- 



■:i^ey-j THE WORKING CLASS AFTER 1842 n^ 

We have other evidence of the improved condition of 
the people than the increased activity of business and 
the surplus in the national treasury. The emigration 
from the United Kingdom, which was 128,344 in 1842, 
was only 57,212 in 1843/ ^^ 1844 and 1845 ^^ was 
slightly greater, but it did not reach the old level until 
after the Irish famine. The number of marriages to each 
hundred thousand of the population increased from 1473 
in 1842 to 1515 in 1843 5 1597 in 1844, and 1713 in 1845.^ 
The per capita expenditure for poor relief, which 
amounted in 1842-3 to 6s. S^d., stood at 6s. ofd. for 
the next two years and fell in 1845-6 as low as 5s. io|d., 
the rate existing in 1839-40.3 The percentage of the 
population seeking poor relief declined as markedly as 
the expenditure for their benefit. In 1842-3, nine and 
one-half per cent of the population of England and Wales 
received either indoor or outdoor relief from the public 
funds; in 1843-4, nine percent; in 1844-5, eight and 
eight-tenths per cent, and in 1845-6 only seven and nine- 
tenths per cent.'^ It is not until 1846 that the advance 
towards prosperity suffered any check in Great Britain, 
although Ireland already suffered in the winter of 1845 
from the failure of the potato crop in that year, the first 
of a series of bad years in agriculture. 

The failure of the potato crop in 1845 ^^^ ^^e follow- 
ing seasons only accentuated the dear-food grievance 
which threatened a vigorous renewal of both the anti- 
Corn Law and the Chartist agitations whenever hard 
times should recur. England could no longer feed her- 
self. In spite of high protective tariffs the import of 

^ Nicholls, History of the English Poor Law. 
^Parliamentary Papers, 1847-8 (967) xxv, i et seq. 
^ Ibid., 1852 (1461) xxiii, i et seq. 
■'Nicholls, op. cit., p. 390. 



I20 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [368 

grain increased. For the five-year period 1831-35, the 
per capita annual excess of grain imports over grain ex- 
ports was 0.036 quarters; from 1836 to 1840, 0.082 
quarters; from 1841 to 1845, 0.099 quarters.' It is true 
that the excess importation of wheat and wheat flour, 
which amounted in 1842 to 2,979,409 quarters, fell to 
little more than a million quarters for the three succeed- 
ing years,^ but the net importation of other grain and 
flour increased.3 In 1842 the average price of wheat per 
imperial bushel was 7s. i|d., distinctly lower than in any 
previous year since 1837, but higher than in any succeed- 
ing year till 1847.** 

The period from 1846 to 1848 was important in British 
history for three reasons ; there was a partial recrudes- 
cence of Chartism,^ a return of the economic depression 
which characterized previous periods of political agita- 
tion, and a marked change in the attitude of Parliament 
towards the questions of free trade and factory regula- 
tion. The net importation of wheat in 1846 was more 
than double what it had been in 1845, and the net 
importation of other grain and meal increased in similar 
proportion.^ Prices of grain and meat rose rapidly. In 
1845 wheat sold on the average at 6s. 4id. per imperial 
bushel; barley, at 3s. iijd. ; oats at 2s. 9fd.7 In 1846, 

^ Parliamentary Papers, 1867 (88) Ixiv, 6S7 et seq. 

^Ibid., 1843, 1,007,962 quarters; 1844 1,302,828 quarters; 184S, 1,073,- 
937 quarters. 

^Ibid., 1842, 550,110 quarters; 1845, 1,184,852 quarters. 

^Parliamentary Papers, 1888 (312) x, i et seq., p. 159. 

* Cf. supra, p. 94 ^^ seq. 

^Parliamentary Papers, 1867 (86) Ixiv, 657 et seq. 

Net wheat importation Net importation of other grain and meal 
1845. . 1,073,937 quarters 1,184,852 quarters 

1846 . . 2,202,778 " 2,348,707 " 

"^ Ibid., 188S (312) X, I et seq., p. 159. 



369] THE WORKING CLASS AFTER 1842 12 1 

wheat was at 6s. lod. ; barley at 4s. id. ; oats at 2s. iijd. 
In March 1845 eight pounds of beef cost 2s. 8d. ; one 
year later 3s. 8d.' During the same year mutton ad- 
vanced in price from 3s. 4d. to 4s. 4d. The incessant 
campaign of the Anti-Corn Law League had prepared 
the public mind for abandoning the time-honored policy 
of protection to the agricultural interests, and the almost 
total failure of the potato crop together with a rise in 
price of grain and of meat gave a practical edge to the 
theoretical arguments of the League. 

From 1842 to 1846 each of the four chief political 
groups in England had a tariff policy of its own. The 
Tories favored protection under a sliding scale which 
would keep prices from rising too high by permit- 
ting the importation of grain when it was costly in 
England, and shutting it out by increasingly high rates 
of duty when it was too cheap in England to give the 
farmers a reasonable profit. The members of the party 
differed widely as to the proper measure of protection 
to be granted ; Sir Robert Peel, as his tariff revision of 
1842 showed, ^ favored a moderate scale designed less 
to secure a monopoly of domestic markets for British 
farmers than to steady prices against sudden fluctua- 
tions such as might result from full competition with 
foreign growers under free trade. The Whigs, with Lord 
John Russell as their chief spokesman, were in favor of 
a fixed duty of a few shillings the quarter — a revenue 
duty with only incidental protection. The Radicals for 
the most part favored free trade immediate and com- 
plete. The Chartist attitude toward the question was 
largely negative. While condemning the protectionists, 

'^Parliamentary Papers, 1851 (in 577) liii, 297 et seg. 
* CL supra, pp. 65-6. 



122 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [370 

the Chartists viewed with the greatest suspicion any 
attempt to deal with the tariff problem by a Parliament 
which represented only upper-class interests. The grav- 
ity of the situation in 1845-6 made Peel a full con- 
vert to the necessity for free trade. Against the oppo- 
sition of a majority of his own party he forced through 
Parliament a repeal of the whole protective system as 
applied to agriculture. 

The new law placed a duty of ten shillings on wheat 
when it sold for less than forty-eight shillings the quar- 
ter, with a reduction of one shilling duty for each rise in 
price of equal amount until wheat sold at fifty-three shill- 
ings or more, when a duty of four shillings was imposed.^ 
This schedule was to hold good only until February i, 
1849, after which time oats, barley, and wheat would pay 
a nominal duty of a shilling the quarter whatever their 
price in the British market. Oats in the meantime were 
to be dutiable according to a sliding scale with a max- 
imum tariff of four shillings the quarter when oats were 
under eighteen shillings ; barley, rye, pease and beans had 
a maximum duty of five shillings at prices of less than 
twenty-six shillings. Maize and buckwheat retained 
only the nominal one shilling duty; duties on animals, 
meats and vegetables were generally abolished ; colonial 
grain and meal of all sorts sank at once to the rates of 
1849, Flour and meal from foreign ports retained duties 
similar to those on grain; a 196 lb. barrel of wheat-flour, 
for example, paid the same tariff as 38^ gallons of 
wheat. The value to the farmers of the small measure 
of protection retained for three years, was considerably 
lessened by the action of the government in suspending 
the Corn and Navigation Laws during the famine ; at first 

' Hansard, 3rd series, vol. Ixxxiii, pp. 283-4. 



37^] 



THE WORKING CLASS AFTER 1842 



123 



till September 1847 ; ' later till March 1848.^ But in spite 
of the measures of the government, food remained at 
famine prices during 1847, ^^'^ ^^^ ^^^ become very 
cheap until the full force of the new fiscal system was 
felt in the years following 1849. 

The following table has been prepared to illustrate the 
general trend of the retail prices of foodstuffs during the 
years 1842 to 1853.3 In case of each commodity the aver- 
age for the five years preceding this period ('1837-41) 
has been taken as the base, and the averages for each 
succeeding year compared with it. 



Years 






Wheat 


Barley 


Oats 


Beef 


Mutton 


1837-41 ... 100 


100 


100 


100 


100 


1842 . 




89 


81 


80 


91 


90 


1843- 






78 


87 


77 


79 


82 


1844. 


. 






80 


99 


86 


77 


82 


1845- 








79 


93 


94 


87 


94 


1846. 








85 


96 


99 


lOI 


107 


1847- 








108 


130 


120 


108 


114 


1848 








78 


93 


86 


106 


112 


1849. 








69 


81 


72 


87 


94 


1850. 








62 


68 


69 


77 


86 


1851 ■ 








60 


72 


78 


75 


90 


1852. 








63 


84 


80 


79 


92 


1853- 








• 83 


97 


88 


99 


109 



The repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 was but part of 
a program of liberalizing the British commercial system. 
Prohibitory and unproductive import duties, export 
duties and various excises were abolished under the 
ministry of Sir Robert Peel and afterwards.^ In 1849 



^ 9 and 10 Vict. c. i, 2, 3, ^9 and 10 Vic. c. 64, 83. 

' Compiled from data in Parliamentary Papers, 1888 (312) x, i 
et seg.; 1851 (in 577) liii, 297 et seq.; 1854 (468) Ixv, 551 et seq. 

* These changes are particularized in G. R. Porter, The Progress of 
the Nation, revised by F. W. Hirst (London, 1912), pp. 683-4. 



124 ^^^ DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [372 

the Navigation Laws were repealed/ and in 1851 the 
vexatious window tax.'' The total value of export duties, 
import duties, excises and other taxes abolished from 
1842 to 1850 inclusive amounted to over ten million 
pounds.3 By the end of the period of Chartist agitation 
the British tariff was practically one "for revenue only." 
The manufacturers and the commercial middle class had 
won a complete victory for the free-trade system which 
they advocated, but in turn they too were forced to make 
concessions. They could no longer resist the demand 
for factory reform. The free-trade victory weakened the 
opposition to government regulation of the hours of 
labor in at least three v;ays. It deprived the opponents 
of state action of their argument that so long as British 
industry was hampered by a domestic grain monopoly 
British manufacturers could not meet foreign competition 
without working their operatives for hours as long as 
those which prevailed in other countries. It made un- 
tenable the theory, commonly advanced by the Radicals, 
that the mere abolition of the Corn Laws would so 
improve the condition of the manufacturing interests 
that the hours of labor would fall of their own accord to 
the level to which philanthropists thought to reduce 
them by legislation. Finally, it ranged against the factory 
owners the entire political strength of the landholding 
classes, who could not see why, if the government abol- 
ished the protection which they had so long enjoyed in 
order that the laboring population might have cheap 
food, it should not also, on similar humanitarian grounds, 
grant the factory operatives the reduction in hours which 
they desired. The indefatigable earnestness of the factory 
reformers, joined to the humanitarianism of the land- 

^ By the 12 and 13 Vict. c. 29. ^ By the 14 and 15 Vict. c. 39.' 

^ Detailed in Parliamentary Papers, 1851 (in 140) xxxi, 163 et seq. 



373] 'THE WORKING CLASS AFTER 1842 125 

owners (spiced as it was with animosity against the free 
trade manufacturers), at last prevailed over the opposi- 
tion of the middle-class element in both of the great 
political parties and factory reform was accomplished. 

But the first important labor legislation during the 
years of Chartist activity concerned not the textile fac- 
tories but the mines. The conditions revealed in the in- 
vestigation of the labor of women and children in mines 
and collieries so startled Parliament and the nation that 
Lord Ashley was able to carry in 1842' a very drastic 
law to remedy the evils discovered. The new law abso- 
lutely forbade the labor of women and of children under 
ten years of age below the surface of the ground, pro- 
vided for the establishing of inspectorships, and instituted 
certain minor reforms, such as prohibiting the employ- 
ment of any person under fifteen years of age to take 
charge of engines or hoisting machinery and forbidding 
the payment of wages in public houses. Lord Ashley 
also succeeded in carrying a factory act in 1844^ which 
classed women with ''young persons,'' provided for the 
safeguarding of machinery, lowered the minimum age of 
employment from nine to eight but enacted a half-time 
schedule for young children, placed the twelve-hour day 
for young persons and women between 5.30 a. m. and 
8.30 p. m., and increased the power of the factory in- 
spector.3 But Parliament still refused to grant the fun- 
damental demand of the factory reformers for a ten-hour 
day for young persons and for women. The principle of 
regulation, however, was extended in 1845 from the tex- 
tile factories to the print works.* 

* 5 and 6 Vict. c. 99. - 7 and 8 Vict. c. 15. 

^B. L. Hutchins and A. Harrison, History of Factory Legislation 
(London, 1911), pp. 85-7. 

* By the 8 and 9 Vict. c. 29. 



126 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [374 

Lord Ashley's most famous factory bill ' was introduced 
in 1846 but postponed for six months on its second 
reading,^ and it was not finally carried till 1847. The 
existing law limited the hours of labor of women and 
young persons to twelve hours per day ; the new bill 
provided that eleven hours should constitute a day until 
August 1847 — later extended to May 1848,3 after which 
time a ten-hour day should be enforced. A way was 
discovered to evade the provisions of the Act of 1847 by 
keeping women and young persons at work in "relays," 
allowing hours of rest between spells of work.'* Since it 
was impossible to keep inspectors in every factory at all 
times to watch over the hours of labor of each individual 
worker, it was easy for the unscrupulous employer to 
encroach upon the hours nominally reserved for rest. 
To remedy this state of affairs, Lord Ashley introduced 
another bilP in 1850 fixing the hours of labor of women 
and young persons between six in the morning and six 
at night, or between the hours of seven and seven.^ 
Since only one and a half hours were set aside for meal- 
times, the new day of work was nominally increased to 
ten and a half hours, but the real protection afforded by 
the abolition of the relay system was very great. In 
1853 similar protection was extended to the labor of 
children.7 The importance of this legislation for women 
and young persons is indicated by the Parliamentary 
Report of 1850^ giving the number of operatives em- 
ployed in 4330 inspected textile factories : 

^9 and 10 Vict. c. 29. 

' Hansard, 3rd series, vol. Ixxxv, p. 1080. 

^ Ibid., vol. xci, p. 143. 

* Hutchins and Harrison, op. cit., pp. 101-3. 

* 13 and 14 Vict. c. 54. ® Hutchins and Harrison, op. cit., p. 105. 
■f By the 16 and 17 Vict. c. 104. 

^Parliamentary Papers, 1850 (745) xlii, 476. 



375] THE WORKING CLASS AFTER 1842 12 J 

Boys under thirteen years of age 21,137 

Girls under thirteen years of age ... 19,638 

Male " young persons " from thirteen to eighteen years . . . 67,864 

Female " young persons " and women , . . . 329,577 

Men over eighteen years of age 157,866 

Total number of operatives 596,08a 

The laboring- poor were also the beneficiaries of several 
mitigations of the New Poor Law of 1834. Many- 
abuses of the system were discussed in Parliament until 
action was taken to modify its rigors. The apprenticing- 
of pauper children was restricted in 1844/ provision was 
made for their education, and the machinery of adminis- 
tration was improved. By legislation in 1846'' and 18473 
persons resident for five years in a parish were secured 
against removal ; in the latter it was determined that 
married couples over sixty years of age should not be 
separated in the poor houses/ while in 185 1 further safe- 
guards were thrown around the interests of pauper 
apprentices. 5 Thus the three great popular grievances 
which had done most to build up the Chartist move- 
ment, the protective laws which artificially increased the 
cost of living, the long hours of labor imposed by the 
factory system, and the severity of the New Poor Law, 
were acknowledged to be just grievances and were reme- 
died in part during the declining years of Chartism. 

In spite of the Corn Law repeal the industrial de- 
pression of 1847-8 brought almost as much suffering to 
the working classes of Great Britain as the preceding 
crisis of 1842. The distress of the country was so 
marked as to compel recognition even in the royal 
address, which stated, in November, 1847, that : 

^ By the 7 and 8 Vict. c. loi. ^9 and 10 Vict. c. 66. 

' 10 and II Vict. c. no. * By the 10 and 11 Vict. c. 109. 

* By the 14 and 15 Vict. c. 11. 



128 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [376 

Her Majesty has seen with great concern the distress which 
has for some time prevailed among the commercial classes. 
. . . Her Majesty has deeply sympathized with the sufferings 
which afflict the labouring classes in the manufacturing dis- 
tricts of Great Britain, and in many parts of Ireland ; and Her 
Majesty has observed with admiration the patience with which 
these sufferings have been generally borne/ 

The finances of the nation showed the effects of the 
depression very clearly. In 1846 the budget had a sur- 
plus of £2,846,308, a decline of almost one million pounds 
from the surplus of 1845.^ In 1847 there was a deficit of 
£2,956,684; in 1848, one of £796,419.3 The burden of 
the public debt increased by 1848 to an even greater sum 
than that of 1842 ;'^ the interest charges, however, were 
not quite so heavy as during the earlier year.^ The real 
or declared value of British and Irish produce and manu- 
factures also decreased, from £60,111,082 in 1845 to 
£52,849,446 three years later.^ The number of bank- 
ruptcies and insolvencies reported in the Annual Reg- 
ister rose from 1274 in 1845 to 2377 in 1848. The poor 
rate, which was only 5s. lo^^d per capita in 1845-6, rose 
in 1846-7 to 6s. 2%^. and to 7s. i^d. in 1847-8.^ The 
percentage of the population of England and Wales in 
receipt of poor relief increased with marked abruptness 

^ Annual Register, vol. Ixxxix, p. 188. 

* Parliamentary Papers, 1851 (in 140) xxxi, 163 et seq. 

* The deficit was due in part to the grants to relieve the agricultural 
distress prevailing in Ireland. ^1,525,000 was appropriated in 1847; 
£276,277 in 1848. 

*■ 1842 ;^ 791, 757,816; 1848 791,817,338. Parliamentary Papers, 1857-8 
C443) xxxiii, 165 et seq. 

* 1842 ;^29,300,ii2; 1848 ^28,307,343. Ibid. 
^Parliamentary Papers, 1866 (509) Ixvi, 717 et seq. 
"^ Ibid., 1852 (1461) xxiii, i. 



377] ^^^ WORKING CLASS AFTER 1842 J29 

from 7.9 in 1845-6 to 10. i in 1846-7 and 10.8 in 1847-8/ 
More was spent in proportion to the population on the 
relief of the poor in 1847-8 than in any previous year 
since 1835, but some allowance should perhaps be 
made for the slightly greater liberality with which the 
law was administered in 1847 than in 1842. 

In most branches of industry no very marked change 
occurred in the average rates of wages from the early 
years of Chartist activity to the end of the hard times of 
1848. But in most grades of factory labor and manufac- 
tures the general tendency was toward improvement. 
In the cotton factories near Manchester the wages of 
engine-tenders, stokers, lodge-keepers, warehousemen, 
reelers, winders, doublers, doffers, all grades of carders, 
spinners and throstle spinners, showed a substantial in- 
crease between 1839 ^^*^ 1849, ^he two years selected for 
comparison in the Parliamentary Report. "" The hand 
mule spinners (except the piecers^ and the weavers were 
the only important classes of operatives whose wages de- 
clined, or failed to advance. In the woollen mills of 
Huddersfield and its neighborhood, no grades of labor 
decreased in price; and of thirty-five grades, twenty-seven 
showed a distinct advance. ^ On the other hand, the 
wages of silk weavers, spinners and dyers,* and of flax 
spinners, remained unaltered practically from 1839 to 
1849.S 

The wages of machine workers and metal manufac- 
turers generally showed almost no change from 1839 ^^ 
1849,^ but after 1842 the workers in the iron foundries 

^Nicholls, op. cit., p. 390. 

"^Parliamentary Papers, 1887 (c. 5172) Ixxxix, 273 et seq. pp. 47-4Q. 

^ Ibid., p. 95. *^ Ibid., p. 123. "Ibid., p. 67. 

^ Wages Report, op. cit., p. 171. 



130 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [37S 

made a considerable gain. From 1842 to 1848 the aver- 
age of the increases for nine grades of labor in the South 
Wales iron works, was forty-nine per-cent/ although a 
slight decline had taken place in the two years following 
1846.=' The statistics for North Wales, covering the 
years from 1844 to 1849, show a distinct advance, 
although here too, as in Staflfordshire,^ the wages level 
for 1848 and 1849 was lower than for the two preceding 
years. In the building trades, the average wage increase 
from 1839 to 1849 was six per-cent*; for glass-workers, 
in the neighborhood of Manchester, fifteen per-cent ; * 
in the boot and shoe manufacture, in Worcester and 
Manchester, seven per-cent.^ Wages in the potteries 
remained practically unchanged, although the brick 
labourers received a slight raise.' Of the important 
classes which furnished the larger number of recruits to 
the Chartist movement, only a part of the miners and 
colliers suffered a marked decline in wages between the 
earlier and the later years of the agitation. The South 
Wales miners and colliers earned nineteen and a half per- 
cent less in 1848 than in 1842,^ but in Staffordshire the 
average increase in the wages of miners and colliers from 
18439 to 1848 was nineteen and a half per-cent.^° 

Two other classes of wage-earners remain to be consid- 
ered : the hand-loom weavers and the agricultural laborers. 
After 1835 th^ weekly wages of the hand-loom weavers 

' Wages Report, op. cit., p. 27. 

» Ibid. , p. 31 . * ^bid. , p. 30. 

^Ibid., p. 361. Bricklayers, stone-masons, plasterers, slaters, car- 
penters, plumbers, painters and laborers of Worcester. 

^ Ibid., p. 243. Averages for seven grades of labor. 

*7d«</., p. 25s, p. 258. '/(Jirf., p. 240. ^ Ibid.,^. 2i,. 

® 1842 figures not given for Staffordshire. ^'^ Ibid., p. 25. 



379] ^^^ WORKING CLASS AFTER 1842 j^I 

remained fairly constant at 6s. 3d.,' but their numbers 
steadily declined. In 1842 there were still some 97,000 
hand-loom weavers,' a class large enough to count seri- 
ously in a political agitation. In 1848 there were only 
fifty thousand ; and in 1854, at the end of the Chartist 
movement, only thirty thousand, or less than a seventh 
of the number in the year when the Reform Bill was 
carried. R. E. Prothero gives the following estimate of 
nominal weekly agricultural wages for 1837 ^"^ for 
1850-1.3 

1837 1850-S1 

North and North-Western England 12s. id. iis. lod. 

North-East and Eastern England ids. 4d. 9s. id. 

South-East England and East Midlands .... los. od. 9s. 5d. 

South-West England and West Midlands ... 8s. lod. 7s. 2d. 

It would be a mistake, however, to infer from this table 
that the real wages of agricultural labor had declined from 
1837 to 1850-1, for prices were much lower in the latter 
year than in the former. 

In spite of the fall in the wages of agricultural labor in 
the years immediately following the repeal of the Corn 
Laws, the period of the decline of the Chartist move- 
ment was characterized by rapid agricultural develop- 
ment. In the five years from 1840 to 1844 inclusive 
only 120,780 acres of land not hitherto under cultivation 
were developed, while during the next five years, from 
1845 to 1849, ^7Z^9^7 acres were placed under cultiva- 
tion.'^ Technical improvement was rapid. The Royal 
Agricultural Society, established in 1838, spread scien- 

' G. H. Wood, His lory of Wages in the Cotton TVarf^ (London, 1910), 
pp. 127-8. "^ Ibid. 

'Prothero, English Farming Past and Present (London, 1912), 
pp. 68-70. 

* Porter, Progress of the Nation, p. 188. 



132 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [380 

tific knowledge among the farmers. The clay soil was 
drained at such expense on the part of the landlords and 
the farmers that in 1846 Parliament appropriated four mil- 
lion pounds to assist in the work/ The soil was more 
carefully manured, and more fertilizer was imported. 
The importation of Peruvian guano in 1841 was only 
1700 tons; in 1847, 220,000 tons."" From 1850 onwards 
steam as a motive power began to be applied in agricul- 
ture.3 But the full return of agricultural prosperity was 
delayed by low prices and poor crops until after 1853. 

The first effects of Corn Law repeal were not of long 
duration. The average annual net importation of grain 
and meal was 0.310 quarters per capita from 1846 to 1850; 
but it decreased to 0.291 from 1851 to 1855."^ The de- 
velopment of railroading in the fifth and sixth decades 
of the century was of great advantage to the British farm- 
ers in enabling them to transport their crops to market 
readily and cheaply. By 1854 grain and meat sold for 
prices as high as those which prevailed under the old 
protective system, partly because of the abnormal situa- 
tion created by the Crimean War, partly because of the 
cheapening of gold which resulted from the opening of 
new mines in California in 1848 and 1849. The farmers 
were aided in their attempt to retain the domestic mar- 
ket in competition with the foreign producer by the good 
years and abundant harvests after 1853.^ The high de- 
gree of agricultural prosperity existing during the decade 
which followed the end of the Chartist movement was 
certainly one factor in lessening possible political discon- 
tent. The agricultural laborer shared to some degree 

^ W. Hasbach, History of the English Agricultural Laborer, p. 243. 
*Prothero, op. cit., p. 366. ^ Ibid., p. 369. 

^Parliamentary Papers, 1867 (86) Ixiv, 657 et seq. 
* Hasbach, op cit., p. 246, 



381] THE WORKING CLASS AFTER 1842 j^^ 

in the new prosperity. From 1850 to i860 the average 
weekly wages for agricultural laborers rose from lis. 
lod. in the northern and north-western counties to 13s. 
5d.; in the eastern and north-eastern counties, from 9s, 
id. to IIS, id.; in the southeastern and east midland 
counties, from 9s. 5d. to lis. 9d.; in the south-western 
and south midland counties, from 7s. 2d. to 9s. iid.^ 
" So far as the standard of the highest farming is con- 
cerned, agriculture has made but little advance since the 
'Fifties," wrote R. E. Prothero in 1912;^ and W. E. 
Bear gave as his opinion that, taking everything into 
consideration, "the period of ten years ending with 1862 
was probably the most prosperous decade ever enjoyed 
by British agriculturists." ^ 

But Chartism was always an urban rather than a rural 
movement, and if hard times had continued in the manu- 
facturing districts the agricultural improvement might 
indeed have weakened Chartism but could not have 
stopped its progress among the artisans in the towns. 
The industrial crisis passed, however, even before the 
agricultural depression had come to an end. As early 
as February 1849, the royal address congratulated Par- 
liament and the country on the improvement in com- 
mercial and industrial conditions,4 while two years later 
the address spoke of " the difficulties felt by that import- 
ant body among my people who are owners and occupiers 
of land." 5 The national finances improved greatly during 
the years which followed the depression of 1848. In 
place of the deficit existing in 1847 ^^^ 1848, there was 
a surplus of more than two million pounds in 1849 ^^^ 

' Prothero, op. cit., pp. 68-70. "^ Ibid., p. 346. 

^ H. D. Traill, Social England, 6 vols. (London, 1899), vol. vi, p. 409. 

*^ Annual Register, vol. xci, p. 3. ^ Ibid., vol. xciii, p. 3. 



134 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [382 

of over two and a half millions in 1850.' From 1848 to 
1854 the national debt was diminished from £791,817,338 
to £769,082,549; the interest and other annual charges 
from £28,307,343 to £27,715,203." In 1848 the real or 
declared value of the exports of the manufactures and 
produce of the United Kingdom was £52,849,446; in 
1853, £98,933,781 ; an increase of more than eighty-seven 
per cent in five years.^ The number of bankruptcies and 
insolvencies reported in the Annual Register decreased 
from 2377 in 1848 to 1009 in 1853. 

The clearest evidence of the increasing well-being of 
the masses of the people appears in the statistics of 
pauperism and criminality. The annual poor rate de- 
clined three years later from 7s. i%^d. per capita in 1848 
to 5s. 6}4d., the lowest rate since 1838.'* The percent- 
age of the population of England and Wales in receipt of 
poor relief decreased steadily from 10.8 in 1847-8 to 4.8 
in 1 852-3. s The hard times of the early 'forties had 
been characterized by much violence and theft. Making 
every allowance for the effect on criminal statistics of 
the multiplication of laws and their better enforcement, 
it seems clear that up to that time criminality had been 
on the increase. 

In 1841 the number of committals had greatly outstripped the 
increase of population in every county in England. In Rut- 
land, which showed the lowest increase of population between 
1805-1841, i. e., only thirty per cent., crime had increased 250 
per cent. ; in Monmouth, where population had increased 

^ 1849 ;^2, 098, 126; 1850 ;^2, 578,806. Parliamentary Papers, 1851 (in. 
140) xxxi, 163 et seq. 
^Parliamentary Papers, 1857-8 (443) xxxiii, 165 et seq. 
^ Ibid., 1866 (509) Ixvi, 717 et seq. 
*^ Ibid., 1852 (1461) xxiii, i et seq. 
^Nicholls, op. cit., pp. 390, 424. 



383] THE WORKING CLASS AFTER 1842 in- 

most rapidly, i. e., 128 per cent., crime had increased 1720 per 
cent. . . . For the whole of England, while population increased 
seventy-nine per cent, between 1805 and 1841, committals 
increased 482 per cent.^ 

In 1841 the number of committals was 174.6 to each 
100,000 persons in England and Wales; in 1851, 156.2." 
Much indirect evidence of the prosperity of the period 
which followed the years of Chartist agitation is con- 
tained in the Report of 1865 ^ o^ the improvement in 
the condition of the people of England and Wales, and 
the supplementary Report for Scotland and Ireland in 
1866. ■♦ Between the census years of 183 1 and 1861 
the population of England and Wales increased by 444 
per-cent. During the same period the number of day 
scholars increased by 146.7 per-cent. The amount de- 
posited in savings banks from 1831 to 1864 increased 
by 209 per-cent, but the number of depositors by 338 
per-cent, thus showing that the practice of depositing 
savings was spreading more and more widely among the 
masses of the people. Not only the proportion, but the 
absolute number of paupers decreased from 1849 to 
1861, the decrease amounting to 18.8 per cent. From 
1839 to 1864 the number of letters delivered by the post 
office increased in England and Wales by 834 per cent; 
in Scotland, by 743 per cent; in Ireland, by 556 per 
cent. Perhaps the most important facts brought out in 
the first Report dealt with the change in the consump- 
tion of certain taxed or dutiable articles of food and 
drink in the United Kingdom. The use of tea increased 
195.36 per cent; the use of coffee, 38.5 per cent; the use 

^ Porter, op. cit., p. 105. '^ Ibid., p. no. 

' Parliamentary Papers, 1865 (iQS) xlvii, 447. 
*Ibid., 1866 (116) Ivii, 843. 



136 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [384 

of sugar, 119.26 per cent; the use of wine, 83.48 per 
cent; the use of malt, 32 per cent; the use of spirits, 
0.13 per cent.' In other words the per capita consump- 
tion of tea, sugar and wine greatly increased, that of 
cofiFee and malt underwent little change, while that of 
spirits showed a marked decline. 

It is questionable if British labor received a propor- 
tionate share in the rapidly increasing wealth of the Brit- 
ish empire of trade, but there can be no doubt that the 
general rise in wages from the Reform Bill of 1832 to 
the Reform Bill of 1867 was great enough to revolu- 
tionize the daily life of the laborer. Arthur L. Bowley 
estimated the change in average weekly wages during 
this period as follows : "" 

1833 1867 

London artizans 28s. od. 36s. od. 

Provincial artizans 22s. od. 27s. od. 

Town laborers 14s. od. 20s. od. 

Agricultural laborers los. 6d. 14s. od. 

Add to this change in nominal wages the effect of free 
trade upon the cost of living, the shortening of hours 
of labor by legislative action, the readjustment of taxa- 
tion, the decrease in pauperism and unemployment, and 
the conclusion is irresistible that the peculiar economic 
conditions which created the Chartist movement largely 
disappeared during the period of middle-class rule and 
that the renewed agitation for the franchise had behind 
it other forces and motives than the misery of the people. 
But before leaving the large and important subject of 
the bearing of economic conditions upon the progress 
and decline of the Chartist movement, it is well to com- 
pare the trend of wages in some typical and important 

' The consumption of domestic spirits showed z decrease of 7 per cent. 
° A. L. Bowley, Wages in the United Kingdom in the Nineteenth 
Century (Cambridge, 1900), p. 70. 



3^5] 



THE WORKING CLASS AFTER 1842 



137 



industry, the cost of living, and the fortunes of the 
movement. For this purpose the average annual wages 
in the cotton factories has been taken, not only because 
of the importance of the industry in itself and the unus- 
ually complete wages data we have for it,' but also be- 
cause it furnished so many recruits to the Chartists. 
The average of the wages from 1838 to 1841 inclusive 
has been chosen as the basis of comparison with rates of 
later years. The index of the cost of living has been 
taken by averaging the index numbers of the retail prices 
of foodstuffs listed on page 108, but weighting wheat as 
double because of its general use in bread. 



Years 
1837-41 

1842 



1843 
1844 
1845 
1846 

1847 

1848 

1849 
1850 

1851 
1852 

1853 



Wages 
100 

99 



Prices 
100 

87 



96 


80 


99 


84 


104 


88 


104 


95-5 


96 


115 


96 


92 


96 


79 


96 


71 


98 


72.S 


100 


77 



Remarks 

The first five years of Chartism. 

(Unemployment general. 
Monster petition for the Charter. 
Political strike in August. 

>- Chartism inactive. 



/ Famine in Ireland. 

I Signs of a revival of the movement. 

5 Chartist movement active. 

i O'Connor elected to Parliament. 

f Chartist demonstration in April. 
\ Movement shown to be declining. 



Numerous desertions from the party » 






105 



93 



Chartists lack funds to support an agi- 
tation. 

The Chartist organization disappears. 



^ Wood, History of Wages in the Cotton Trade, pp. 127-8. 



CHAPTER V 

A Discussion of the Cause of the Decline of the 
Chartist Movement 

The one episode in the history of Chartism which is 
never omitted even from the briefest narratives of Eng- 
lish poHtics in the nineteenth century is the famous 
demonstration of the tenth of April in 1848. This is but 
natural, for the extravagant claims and revolutionary 
language of the Chartist leaders, the general fear of a 
revolution paralleling that across the Channel, the gar- 
risoning of London with an army of special police con- 
stables including in their number the future Emperor 
of the French, and finally the pitiable inadequacy both 
of the demonstration and of the petition to fulfil the 
hopes or fears universally entertained in regard to 
them, made the incident worth relating for its own 
sake as well as for its historical significance. The peti- 
tion of 1848 was in truth of the greatest significance as 
evidence both of the weakness and of the strength of 
Chartism, but the disproportionate emphasis usually 
given it has made it seem the climax of the whole agita- 
tion, and has also made the decline of the movement 
appear simply the natural consequence of the chagrin of 
the Chartists over their failure and the ridicule which 
was heaped upon them after the examination of the 
petition. 

No impression could be further from the truth. In 
the first place, Chartism had twice before put forth its 
strength, in 1839 and in 1842, and on both occasions the 
138 [386 



2^7] CAUSE OF THE DECLINE 139 

effort resulted only in failure and repression. The 
movement seemed as dead in 1840 and in 1843 ^s in 
1849; the difference being that after the first failure the 
agitation revived stronger than ever, after the second it 
revived more slowly and in a weakened form, while from 
the third failure it never recovered. No doubt the cumu- 
lative effect of three rejections of their petition tended 
to discourage the weaker members of the party ; but if 
each occasion had revealed an increasing strength among 
the people, many others would have joined the movement 
in the hope that Parliament could not much longer dis- 
regard the growing impatience of the people for reform. 
The agitations for the Reform Bill and for the repeal of 
the Corn Laws had for many years to meet as unwaver- 
ing an opposition from the government as the agitation 
for the Charter, but the Radicals and the Anti-Corn Law 
League only gained fresh strength at each repulse and 
persisted in their efforts till they attained final victory. 
It is improbable that the ruling classes could have re- 
sisted indefinitely an agitation for manhood suffrage if 
that had had behind it the continuous and active support 
of the working classes of the country. 

The second reason for rejecting the theory that the 
collapse of the demonstration of 1848 was the cause of 
the decline of the movement, is that this collapse itself 
requires explanation. Even if the theory were adequate 
to account for the subsequent weakness of the move- 
ment, it could not explain its declining strength before 
1848. As measured by the comparative number of 
signatures to the petitions of 1842 and 1848, Chartism 
had hardly three-fifths of the strength in the latter year 
that it had enjoyed in the former.' All careful students 

^ Cf. supra, p. lot. 



I40 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [388 

of Chartist history agree that the movement was never 
again so strong as it had been in 1842/ Whatever may- 
have been the cause which scattered the forces of 
Chartism, that cause must have been in operation during 
the period between the two petitions. The view that 
the failure of 1848 " killed " the movement exaggerates 
both the strength of the movement in that year and its 
subsequent weakness. The fiasco of April was but a 
milestone set midway on the downward course of the 
agitation from 1843 to 1853. After 1848 the Chartist 
party dwindled away, rapidly indeed but not abruptly; 
the very fact that some semblance of organization was 
retained for five years later, shows that the party could 
not have perished merely of the ridicule which met it in 
1848. 

It is no doubt true, however, that Chartism as a name 
was doomed by the many blunders associated with its 
history. The later phase of Chartist propaganda was 
subject to the heavy handicap of all the undesirable 
associations which had accumulated about the party. 
Like every other political agitation, Chartism made new 
enemies with each new shift of policy; like a glacier 
advancing down an Alpine valley it pushed before it an 
ever-growing ''terminal moraine" of opposition till it 
could advance no further. The prevailing discontent 
with the party leadership and the chagrin felt at its 
ludicrous collapse in the hour of its testing, is evidenced 
by the numerous reform organizations which sprang up 
after 1848.'' Nothing fails like failure, and the ill-success 

^ Dolleans heads the section of his work, Le Chartisnie, which covers 
the period from 1843 to 1848 " Le DecHn." Tildsley writes: "The 
Chartist movement remained for a few years but with ever-lessening 
force. It had reached its height in 1842 and thereafter had no further 
strength of life." Die Entstehung der Chartistenbewegung , p. 52. 

^ Cf. supra, pp. 106-113. 



389] CAUSE OF THE DECLINE 141 

of the long-continued Chartist propaganda caused many 
to feel that if the working classes were ever to win their 
Charter it must be under some other name. 

But we are not particularly interested in the fate of the 
Charter, for that was but one of many possible demo- 
cratic programs. What really requires explanation is 
the comparative indifference of the people to democratic 
propaganda in every form, the strange political apathy 
which distinguishes the ' fifties from the earlier decades 
of the nineteenth century. The faults and failures of the 
Chartist organization afford no reason why some one of 
the numerous new radical and democratic organizations 
which claimed to be heirs of the principles of the Charter 
should not have revived the agitation for the franchise and 
carried it to victory, freed of the discredited party label 
and the unworthy party leadership which had frustrated 
popular aspirations in the past. But no new working 
class party appeared to take the place of that which had 
been abandoned. Such radical propaganda as yet remained 
was carried on, in a rather mild fashion, within the rec- 
ognized political parties, Liberal and Conservative. The 
most important demand of the Charter, that of a widened 
suffrage, was not granted even in part till more than a 
decade after the disappearance of Chartism ; twenty-five 
years, in fact, after the time of its greatest strength. 

No external political factor will serve to explain the 
decline of Chartism. The growth and decline of the 
movement was quite independent of the party warfare 
of Whigs and Tories. Both parties made conces- 
sions to the economic wants of the working classes 
but neither conceded a single point of the Charter. 
Both Whigs and Tories showed themselves ready to put 
down Chartist agitation with a strong hand whenever in 
their opinion it amounted to "sedition." The Radicals, 



142 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [390 

it is true, were favorable towards the Charter and even 
used what influence they had in Parliament to secure 
liberal treatment for individual Chartists who had incau- 
tiously put themselves in danger of prosecution. But 
the Radicals never formed a ministry and, even if they 
had, it is doubtful if this would have served to break up 
the Chartist party, since the difference on important 
economic issues between the Radicals and the Chartists 
was so great and bitter/ The effect of the repressive 
measures taken against the party leaders was also incon- 
siderable, or at least temporary. When a champion of 
the Charter was imprisoned he became a "martyr" to 
the cause and left prison with enhanced prestige and 
influence. The Chartist agitators did not lack courage 
and regarded the chance — or rather the very high prob- 
ability — of prosecution as one of the inevitable draw- 
backs to a reformer's life so long as the government 
remained under the reactionary sway of the upper classes. 
There is no reason why the prosecutions in 1848, vigor- 
ous as they were, should have been more lastingly effec- 
tive than the prosecutions in 1839, 1842 and 1843. 

One marked political weakness the party had, however, 
which robbed it of much influence possessed by other 
bodies of reformers ; the lack of representation in Parlia- 
ment. From the very nature of the chief demand of the 
Chartists, the enlargement of the electorate, it followed 
that their main appeal must be to the unrepresented. Such 
influence as they could exert upon Parliament had to be 
indirect; the moral effect of great mass meetings, mon- 
ster petitions, strikes, speeches, and the party press. 
The Chartists could sometime elect an individual spokes- 
man, such as O'Connor in 1847, but they never could 

^ Cf. supra. Chap. I. 



39 1 ] CAUSE OF THE DECLINE 143 

get votes enough to appear in the House of Commons 
as a party. In order to get a hearing in Parliament for 
their demands or their grievances they had usually to 
call upon the support of some friendly Radical, as a man 
unable to attend a law suit in person might intrust his 
interests to an attorney. The position of other notable 
agitations in the the nineteenth century in which pres- 
sure from outside Parliament was the main element of 
success was very different. The reformers of 1832 might 
never have forced the House of Lords to yield if the 
country at large had been indifferent to their cause, but 
it was none the less a great practical advantage to the 
Whigs to hold a majority in the House of Commons. The 
Anti-Corn Law League proceeded to arouse the people 
and influence the government by such methods as the 
Chartists employed, mass meeting, petitions, and the like ; 
but they had practically the entire body of Radicals and 
many of the Whigs as their Parliamentary agents and, 
in the later years of their propaganda, the growing sym- 
pathy of the prime minister himself. The Irish National- 
ists in the days of Parnell and afterwards were only a 
small minority as compared with the whole House of 
Commons, but they formed a group which was some- 
times able to hold the balance of power between the two 
great political parties into which the British electorate 
was and is divided. Agrarian disorders made it impossi- 
ble for England to continue to ignore the grievances of 
Ireland ; but only when the fate of a ministry depended 
upon its paying attention to the Irish account of these 
grievances as presented to it by a small but compact Par- 
liamentary group, were methods of coercion gradually 
replaced by remedial legislation. 

Since the unenfranchised workingmen who made up 
the bulk of the Chartist party could exert little or no 



144 ^^^ DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [392 

direct influence on the course of legislation, there re- 
mained only two possible paths to success. Either they 
could win to their support men of a different class who 
were represented in Parliament by convincing them that 
their demands were just, or at least that it would be un- 
wise not to yield to them, or else they might carry 
through a revolution in which the authority of Parlia- 
ment would be wholly set aside or ignored. The latter 
method was never seriously contemplated by any con- 
siderable number of the party ; the risk of failure was too 
great and the possibility of success too remote. Even 
the physical force Chartists thought rather of intimidat- 
ing Parliament into passing the Charter than of obtain- 
ing the Charter without its assent, while the moral force 
Chartists believed that they could convert the repre- 
sented classes to Chartism. 

As the complaisance of the upper and middle classes 
was so important to the success of the Chartists, their 
strong insistence upon class solidarity worked to their 
great injury. The working class was strong in numbers 
but wholly without political power and, in those years of 
poverty, practically without economic strength. If the 
Chartists had possessed either the voting power or the 
available funds of the Anti-Corn Law League, they 
could have carried on a far more extensive and effective 
agitation than they did. The presence of a few wealthy 
men in the movement could have tided it over many per- 
iods when the Chartist press could hardly keep alive for 
want of support and when the officials of the party could 
not be paid their salaries. But with a few exceptions, 
of which the most notable was O 'Connor, the leaders of 
the movement were almost as poor as the rank and file. 
Surely the theory of class consciousness was never put 
more forcibly than by Ernest Jones: 



293] CAUSE OF THE DECLINE 1 45 

An amalg-amation of classes is impossible where an amalg-ama- 
tion of interests is impossible . . . All beyond that pale are 
our enemies by the law of nature-unconvertible, (excepting of 
course individual cases of g-enerous and elevated feeling) , and 
therefore not worth the wasting of a single thought or mo- 
ment. . . . These two portions of the community must be 
separated, distinctly, dividedly and openly from each other 
" Class Against Class ; " all other mode of proceeding is mere 
moonshine/ 

Had the Chartists been possessed of but a single pro- 
gram and a single policy, it is possible that the British 
working class, in spite of its political and economic weak- 
ness, might have been welded into a formidable organi- 
zation by the very insistence upon class lines that lost 
Chartism the powerful aid of the middle-class Radicals. 
But the history of the Chartist movement is a continuous 
narrative of schisms and heresy trials over matters of eco- 
nomic doctrine, of political policy or simply of personal 
pique. It is probable that the party at no time had suffi- 
cient cohesion to secure its aims even if all other cir- 
cumstances had favored its success. 

The root difficulty was that the aims of the party were 
really economic rather than political,^ while its program 
was purely political. If Chartism had been only a move- 
ment for political reform, there would have been no cause 
for quarrel with middle-class reformers who desired the 
same thing, there would have been no serious friction 
over the dififerent economic theories held by the different 
leaders, and the improvement in the economic condition 
of the working classes would not have affected the pro- 
gress of the agitation. The Charter in itself was a very 

' Notes to the People, p. 342, capitals in the original. 

^ The economic aims and views of the Chartists are treated in Chapter I. 



146 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [394 

simple political program and all factions of Chartists 
adhered to it with a tenacity which left little ground for 
dispute on the question of the " party platform," while 
the differences of opinion as to policy and method, seri- 
ous as they were, were not peculiar to the Chartist 
movement but common to almost all radical reform 
movements. But "the Charter" had various meanings 
to the different persons who used the term. To al- 
most all it meant more than manhood suffrage, vote 
by ballot and the other four points demanded by the 
party. It was about what more it meant that the leaders 
differed, and differed irreconcilably. 

To William Lovett the Charter was but one element in 
a general program of social amelioration by voluntary 
effort and popular education. To Feargus O'Connor it 
was the political counterpart of a new peasantry re- 
established on the land stolen from their forefathers and 
removed forever from the factory towns. To the Rever- 
end Joseph Stephens, to John Frost and many of the 
other early leaders Chartism meant the repeal of the New 
Poor Law. To J. Bronterre O'Brien it meant currency 
reform and the nationalization of land rents. To Ernest 
Jones, Chartism was proletarian Socialism. The incessant 
and bitter intra-party disputes were not the differences 
of opinion between persons who were agreed as to the 
end of their efforts but quarreled over the means to 
attain it, but the fundamental divergences of men whose 
aims were wide apart and whose only bond of union was 
agreement upon the Charter as the indispensable means 
to attain their diverse and conflicting ends. 

It was just this lack of a definite economic program 
corresponding to the political program of the "six 
points " that made a few individual leaders of such over- 
mastering importance in the movement. Each of the 



395] CAUSE OF THE DECLINE 1 47 

leaders and important journalists of the Chartist party 
had his views of the ultimate aims to which the Charter 
was a means and urged them in season and out, till these 
policies became indissolubly associated with the person- 
alities of their leading advocates. Chartists did not 
group themselves as individualists or collectivists, but as 
O'Connorites, O'Brienites, and the like. As has been 
frequently pointed out, Chartism was essentially a nega- 
tive movement, a protest against the rigidity of the 
New Poor Law, the abuses of the factory system, the 
burden of the public debt, the class character of the 
franchise and numerous other popular grievances. For 
this reason it swept into its ranks all kinds of discontent 
and thus gained enormous strength from the start. But 
the resulting organization was of too miscellaneous a 
composition and contained too many divergent views 
and motives to achieve a working harmony. In a word, 
the Chartists could not agree upon an economic pro- 
gram, because there was none which all or even most of 
the party could accept, nor could they agree to leave eco- 
nomic programs to one side, because it was in such re- 
forms that they were chiefly interested. 

The differences of economic theory, if the most funda- 
mental, were far from being the only issues which rent 
the movement. Immediate methods were in question 
as well as the ultimate goal. It is true that the distinc- 
tion between the moral force and the physical force 
Chartists was neither so clear nor so important as has 
generally been assumed.' But the two tendencies, to 
persuasion and to coercion, did coexist and in such a 
way as to checkmate each other. The moral force 
Chartists were continually reproached for the acts and 

^ Cf. supra, pp. 82-4. 



148 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [396 

Speeches of their alHes, so that their arguments lost 
much of the effect they might have had if the whole 
party had been likewise committed to moral force meth- 
ods. The clearest sign of this was the refusal of Joseph 
Sturge and his group of Complete Suffragists to accept 
the name of Chartist, tainted in their opinion with the 
memories of past violence, although they had already 
declared for every point of the Charter. On the other 
hand, the presence of so many moral force men within 
the party ranks effectually prevented a physical force 
demonstration on any formidable scale. A revolt in 
which the rebels could not carry with them even the 
majority of their own party was not very likely to over- 
awe the government of the British Empire. Such partial 
insurrections and conspiracies as did mark the course of 
this, on the whole, remarkably orderly movement were 
suppressed and punished without the slightest difficulty. 
Another source of friction within the party was the 
jealousy between different bodies of Chartists in various 
parts of the United Kingdom. We have seen how the 
proposal to organize an independent Scottish party had 
threatened the harmony of the movement.' The locals 
in England itself were frequently jealous of each other. 
London and Manchester Chartists alike aspired to have 
their respective cities reckoned as the headquarters of the 
propaganda ; London because of its size and political im- 
portance, Manchester because the strength of the move- 
ment was greatest in the northern manufacturing districts 
of which Manchester was the heart. In 185 1, for example, 
a most bitter campaign was waged between the Man- 
chester Chartist council with the powerful support of the 
Northern Star on the one side, and Ernest Jones and 

''^ Supra, p. 82. 



397] CAUSE OF THE DECLINE 149 

G. J. Harney on the other, as to whether the coming 
party convention should be held in Manchester or in 
London.' 

Many writers have laid the failure of Chartism to the 
unwisdom of the leaders of the party and especially of 
Feargus O'Connor. There is some truth in this view, 
for none of the leaders, able as many of them were, held 
at any time the confidence of all the party. William 
Lovett, the earliest and perhaps the wisest Chartist 
leader, failed altogether to conciliate the more violent 
faction which followed O'Connor, and after 1842 he grew 
discouraged and abandoned active participation in the 
movement. Thomas Cooper was a man of great energy 
and sincerity, but he quarreled easily and made as many 
enemies as friends. J. Bronterre O'Brien and Ernest 
Jones were probably the most original and intelligent of 
those who aspired to the party leadership, but both were 
thorough doctrinaires, inclined to force out of the move- 
ment all who opposed their economic views. Among 
the other prominent men of the party only O'Connor had 
a suf^ciently commanding personality to attract a large 
personal following among the rank and file of the Chart- 
ists. His aristocratic birth, striking presence and fluent 
if somewhat incoherent oratory, were assets that counted 
for much in giving him prestige. He had wealth enough 
to keep his personal organ, the Northern Star, in exist- 
ence during years when other papers were ruined. It 
finally became the official organ of the Chartist party and 
the most widely read workingman's paper in the United 
Kingdom.^ 

^ For the contest over the convention see especially the Friend ot the 
People during the winter of 1850-1. 

^ The maximum circulation of the ' ' Northern Star ' ' was 50,000 a week. 
Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement, p. 18. 



I^o THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [3981 

But in spite of O'Connor's talents and his real enthu- 
siasm for democracy he was almost the worst choice 
for leader that the Chartists could possibly have made. 
His mere association with the movement alienated the 
middle-class Radicals and Parliamentary friends of Chart- 
ism, who regarded him as the most dangerous type of 
demagogue. His Irish birth and affiliations offended 
many of the more insular Radicals.^ Even his friends 
within the party came to regard him as vain, erratic and 
unstable. The land plan, which more than anything else 
established his popularity with the workers, drove into 
opposition most of the other party leaders, including 
O'Brien and Cooper, who saw the impossibility of the 
scheme or feared its effect in distracting the energies of 
the movement from their proper goal. His very confi- 
dence in the enterprise he had fathered was so excessive 
as to wake the suspicion of reflective men. " Although 
not a practical banker," he wrote, " I make bold to as- 
sert that there is not a better, and but few as good, 
accountants in the Bank of England." "^ When he wrote 
an article about the principles upon which his scheme 
was based he characterized it in the following magnilo- 
quent fashion : " I have written a treatise as durable as 
the land." 3 After his election to Parliament he grew 
more and more erratic, till in 1852 a select committee of 
the House of Commons reported on his casc^ and he was 
adjudged mentally irresponsible. How far O'Connor 
was fully sane during his years of activity within the 
Chartist party cannot well be determined, but his eccen- 
tricities prompt the suspicion that his mental weakness 
may have come upon him before it was generally known. 

^For the harmful effect of the Irish influence on Chartism, cf. infra, 
pp. 179-89. 
^ The Laborer, vol. i, p. 187. ^ Ibid., p. 191. 

^Hansard, 3rd series, vol. cxxii, p. 816. 



399] CAUSE OF THE DECLINE 151 

O'Connor's greatest fault as a leader was his jealousy 
of possible rivals. He quarreled successively with all 
the other prominent Chartists, accusing them in the 
Northern Star of treason to the party. The fact that 
he varied his attacks with effusive eulogies and efforts 
towards reconciliation did not lessen the distrust which 
those whom he had libeled felt towards him. By 1848 
he and his followers, such as Ernest Jones and Julian 
Harney, stood practically alone in the movement which 
he had come to dominate. Within the year he had lost 
the bulk of his most enthusiastic supporters. The 
physical force Chartists deserted him after he had failed 
to carry out the projected demonstration of April tenth 
in the face of the precautions taken by the government ; 
those who had been captivated by his land plan were 
undeceived by the failure of the National Land Company 
and the Parliamentary investigation which ended its 
existence ; Ernest Jones and his other lieutenants found 
him too inactive in the cause and tried to carry on the 
movement without him. 

Much light is thrown upon the internal divisions of 
Chartism in a novel which Ernest Jones published 
serially in his Notes to the People. This novel, entitled 
De Brassier, a Democratic Romance, covered the history 
of the Chartist movement under the thin disguise of a 
change of names and particular events. It illustrated 
the various policies and personalities, quarrels and fac- 
tional fights, the conferences, conventions and public 
demonstrations, conspicuous in Chartist party politics, 
but from the most violently partizan viewpoint. " De 
Brassier " was a wealthy aristocrat who entered a demo- 
cratic movement in some country, the identity of which 
was concealed but where the political situation bore 
much likeness to that of England in the ' forties, partly 



152 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [400 

to gratify a demagogic ambition and partly to escape 
his creditors. He played havoc with the movement by 
casting suspicion upon the good faith of the really 
democratic leaders by getting up huge demonstrations 
which resulted in the arrest of others, while he himself 
cleverly evaded the consequences of his acts; and even 
managed to appear as an apostle of reason and modera- 
tion by choosing the right time to desert ; and by selling 
his services to the government as a spy. The novel 
was well written and attracted much comment from 
other Chartists. Ernest Jones emphatically denied that 
he was introducing real personalities into the romance, 
but Gammage has conclusively shown that the speeches 
and many of the acts of " De Brassier " exactly paralleled 
those of O'Connor, "^ If " De Brassier" really stood for 
O'Connor, as seems certain in spite of the author's 
denial, the caricature of the leader's motives was both 
crude and unjust. O'Connor was never a government 
spy and he coveted popularity rather than money. But 
the novel is none the less an excellent illustration of the 
factional spirit which continually frustrated the Chartist 
agitation, not only because it faithfully reproduces in 
fictional form most of the intra-party quarrels, but also 
because the very bitterness of the author's pen is an 
unintended example of that spirit. 

The influence of O'Connor upon the Chartist move- 
ment was wholly harmful so far as it went, but it may 
easily be exaggerated. It was difficult while O'Connor 
still dominated the popular imagination for wiser leaders 
to carry out their policies, but when the reins of leader- 
ship fell from his hands they had once again an oppor- 
tunity to direct the course of the movement. The 

' Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement, pp. 361-6. 



4oi] CAUSE OF THE DECLINE 1 53 

strength and importance of Chartism was never its 
leadership, but the extent to which it won the support of 
workingmen who had not previously taken an active part 
in radical politics. Throughout the century there were 
always men to lead a radical political movement, but 
whether they were wise or foolish individually they could 
accomplish little while they lacked popular support. For 
a little while, from 1837 to 1842 and, on a diminishing 
scale, till after 1848, large numbers of the working 
classes did enter such a movement and made it impor- 
tant and even menacing in spite of the inefficiency of 
their spokesmen. The leaders needed the movement 
more than the movement needed them, and it was lack 
of continued popular support which in the last analysis 
made Chartist success impossible. 

Some have considered that the loss of popular support 
was a part of the general political reaction which followed 
the revolutionary efforts of 1848, represented in England 
by Chartism.^ It is true that there was such a reaction 
towards conservatism, or at least away from revolutionary 
radicalism, in the England of the ' fifties. But it is not 
clear that cessation of Chartist activity bore any relation 
to the politics of the Continent. The ruling classes in 
England may have lost much of their first sympathy for 
the democratic movement at home and abroad when the 
new French republic showed signs of becoming socialis- 
tic and the countries of central Europe were torn by 
civil war, but the Chartists did not share this change of 
sentiment in the slightest degree. On the contrary, they 
rejoiced over the revolutionary attempts in France, Ger- 
many, Hungary, Italy and elsewhere.'' Nor was the 

*E. D. Jones, Chartism — A Chapter in English Industrial History, 
in the Wisconsin Academy of Science, Arts and Letters, vol. xii, pp. 
525-6. ^ Cf. infra, pp. 108-204. 



1^4 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [402 

English situation at all analogous to that existing on the 
Continent. Throughout Europe generally the mere ut- 
terance of Liberal opinions, however little seditious in 
form, was penalized. But while the British upper classes 
acted promptly and ruthlessly enough to suppress insur- 
rectionary Chartism, they did little to check the moral 
force agitation. A Chartist orator or publicist was at 
least as free to advocate the six points after 1848 as 
before that year. The reaction which really affected the 
Chartist movement was neither popular revulsion from a 
radicalism which had been carried to excess, as seems to 
have been the case among the French peasantry of the 
Second Empire; nor governmental repression, as was 
certainly the case among the re-established dynasties of 
Germany and Italy. The reaction from Chartism in 
England was simply indifference. 

Various causes for this indifference have been sug- 
gested, but the economic changes which occurred after 
1842 seem the most important. Some of the suggested 
causes are quite beside the point. Justin McCarthy de- 
clared of Chartism : " Its fierce and fitful flame went 
out at last under the influence of the clear, strong and 
steady light of political reform and education " } Such 
a statement confuses the downfall of insurrectionary 
Chartism with that of the party as a whole. The 
Chartist party was neither composed of the most ig- 
norant men in England nor led by them. The intelli- 
gent artizans of the industrial towns of Lancashire, the 
men who founded trades unions, co-operative societies 
and mutual benefit societies, formed at all times the mass 
of the party. Many of the leaders such as William 
Lovett and Thomas Cooper, were self-educated, but they 

^McCarthy, History of Our Own Times, vol. i, p. 103. 



403] CAUSE OF THE DECLINE 1 55 

were well educated. Thomas Cooper, Gerald Massey, 
and Ernest Jones were poets of unusual talent; J. Bron- 
terre O'Brien was an economist of genuine ability. Such 
leading- Chartists as Holyoke, Linton, Gammage and 
others, who have recorded tneir memories of the move- 
ment, make the narrative literature of the subject highly 
interesting, O'Connor himself was an educated man 
and a lawyer. There is nothing in the mere advance of 
education which could have weakened Chartism ; a better 
educated body of radicals than the Chartists then were, 
would have worked for fuller political democracy quite as 
earnestly and perhaps more effectively. As for political 
reform putting an end to Chartism, the only important 
reforms which were realized during the course of the 
movement were of a purely economic character. 

If any single cause of the decline of the Chartist move- 
ment was more important than others, it was the detach- 
ing from the movement the elements which had given it 
strength. Chartism was essentially a working-class pro- 
test against abuses which were created or maintained by 
upper-class legislation, and, as these abuses were ended 
or diminished, interest in the movement which was sup- 
posed to hold a remedy for them began to flag. After 
the factory reformers, the opponents of the protective 
system, the opponents of the New Poor Law and the 
masses who ascribed their poverty to the operation of the 
laws against their interests had been more or less satisfied, 
the only active members of the party who remained were 
those few who cared for the Charter for its own sake. 
The demands of the small body of radical reformers who 
were such on theoretical grounds were then as always 
ignored by the government. A reform movement, and 
Chartism was no exception to this generalization, is usu- 
ally of no importance in practical politics until it has be- 



1^6 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [404 

hind it those who are conscious of a concrete grievance 
as well as of an abstract anomaly. 

Both the regulation of the hours of factory labor and 
the establishing of free trade benefited the working 
classes in the long run/ but it was rather the mere fact 
of their enactment than their lasting results which pro- 
duced an immediate effect upon the fortunes of Chartism. 
The repeal of the Corn Laws came into operation during 
a year of famine and it was several months before prices 
fell even to their level of the past. The law which lim- 
ited the labor of women and young persons to ten hours 
a day went into effect at a time of industrial depression 
when the factories were worked on part time, keeping 
open not more than seven or eight hours a day.^ But 
the free-traders and the factory reformers felt that the 
results which they desired would surely follow the 
achievement of their policies and so remained satisfied 
for the time being with what they had accomplished. 
Had the return of prosperity been unduly delayed, how- 
ever, new remedies would probably have found support- 
ers and new contingents of reformers would have joined 
the Chartist ranks. 

The victory of the Anti-Corn Law League was a two- 
fold blow for the Chartists. In the first place, it put an 
end to the dear-food grievance which had contributed 
much strength to the agitation for the Charter. In the 
second place, the Chartists had unwisely put themselves 
in opposition, not indeed to the repeal of the Corn Laws, 

' In 1859 factory inspector Robert Baker stated that in spite of the 
great increase in the factory population "all the diseases which were 
specific to factory labor . . . have as nearly as possible disappeared." 
J. M. Ludlow and L. Jones, The Progress of the Working Class ) Lon- 
don, 1867), p. 105. 

' Hutchins and Harrison, History of Factory Legislation, p. 97. 



405] CAUSE OF THE DECLINE 157 

but to the League as an org-anization. Ludlow and Jones 
ascribed the destruction of the Chartist party to its 
hostiHty towards the League.' H. M. Hyndman, writing 
from the point of view of a SociaHst, agreed as to the 
effect of the conflict between the two competing reform 
movements, but placed the blame upon different should- 
ers. ''Unquestionably," he wrote, "the anti-Corn Law 
agitation was one of the great causes of the Chartists to 
carry any portion of their political programme. It was 
a red herring trailed across the path of the democracy."^ 
In 1854 the Northern Tribune sorrowfully confessed that 
" the Anti-Corn-Law League triumphed against both 
Government and working-classes : against at least the 
active portion of the working-classes, the Chartists." ^ 
Thomas Cooper has testified that it was "a part of 
Chartist policy, in many towns, to disturb Corn Law 
Repeal meetings," adding that for his own part he never 
disturbed such a meeting or sufifered his followers to do 
so either. ^ 

The Chartists antagonized not only the Anti-Corn 
Law League but the whole Whig party, and with equally 
unfortunate results. So bitter was their opposition to the 
Whig ministry that in 1841 those Chartists who were 
fortunate enough to be entitled to vote were urged to 
do everything in their power to defeat Whig candidates, 
even at the risk of electing Tories when the victory of a 
Chartist was out of the question.* " To spite the Whigs," 

^ Ludlow and Jones, op cit., p. 88. 

^H. M. Hyndman, The Historical Basis of Socialism in England 
(London, 1883), p. 227. 

^Northern Tribune, Jan. 22, 1854. 

* Life of Thomas Cooper, p. 181. 

^ McDoualV s Chartist and Republican Journal, May 22, 1841; June 
19, 1841. 



1^8 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [406 

wrote Holyoake, " the Chartists gave their support to the 
Tories — their hereditary and unchanging enemies." ^ He 
advanced proof of how^ the Chartists had played into the 
hands of the Tory party: "Francis Place showed me 
cheques paid to them to break up Anti-Corn Law meet- 
ings, because their cause was defended by Whigs. I 
saw the cheques which were sent to Place by Sir John 
Easthope and other bankers, who had cashed them." 
But it must not be thought that the antagonism between 
the Chartists and the Whigs meant that the Chartists had 
gone over to the Tories or that the Tories had all 
become democrats. The occasional support given to 
Tory candidates at the polls was merely a political ma- 
noeuver to embarrass the Whig ministry. It was not a 
very creditable alliance, however, and gave their enemies 
an excellent chance to damage the reputation of the 
movement with yet unattached radicals, as Gammage 
pointed out : 

A more fatal policy could not possibly have been adopted ; 
but for it the Whigs might have sunk into everlasting; con" 
tempt, but this step armed them with a powerful weapon 
wherewith to fight the Chartists, and the term "Tory Chart- 
ist" was adopted in order to load the Chartists with oppro- 
brium, and too well it had its effect.^ 

There is no better illustration of the harm done the 
Chartist cause by the attitude of its leaders than the 
case of Francis Place. He viewed the rise of the Chart- 
ist movement with no little sympathy; in 1838, indeed, 
he was associated with William Lovett in draughting the 

^ G. J. Holyoake, Sixty Years of an Agitator s Life, 2 vols. (Lon- 
don, 1900}, vol. i, p. 85. 

''Gammage, op. cit., p. 193, 



407] CAUSE OF THE DECLINE 159 

Charter for the London Working Men's Association.' 
But he very soon abandoned the agitation in disgust at 
the way in which it was conducted, and from about 1850 
till his death in 1854 he stood aloof from the movement 
which he might have done so much to help. He pre- 
ferred to work with the Parliamentary Radicals and 
thought that the only important good ever likely to 
come from the Chartist movement would be to stimu- 
late the Radicals to greater exertions on behalf of de- 
mocracy by the pressure of popular discontent.^ He 
laid his finger on one of the greatest weaknesses of 
Chartism when he wrote in 1841 : " They [the Chart- 
ists] think they can effect their purpose by taking 
pains to make enemies, when they should be seeking 
to make friends." ^ The Chartists, on their part, dis- 
trusted Place as much as he did them, principally on ac- 
count of his advocacy of the New Poor Law of 1834.^^ 
Any attempt to champion that obnoxious law was an un- 
forgivable sin in the eyes of the majority of Chartists. 

It may be objected at this point that even if the vic- 
tory of the Anti-Corn Law League had robbed Chartism 
of its free-trader contingent, and the accomplishment of 
the ten-hour day had satisfied the more urgent demands 
of the factory reformers, the grievance of those who had 
sought in Chartism the repeal of the New Poor Law was 
never met and they might well have remained within the 
party until their object too was achieved. But while the 
Elizabethan law has never been restored, the Amendment 
Act of 1834 was modified by less stringent administration 
and also by legislative action." The resentment against 
the new system was, after all, of a temporary character. 

^ Graham Wallas, Life of Francis Place (London, 1898), p. 367. 
^ Ibid., p. 2,(>9- * Ibid., ^. Z7^. * Ibid., p. 333. 

' Cf. supra, p. 127. 



l6o THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [408 

The agitation against the New Poor Law was a large 
factor in Chartism only during its earliest period, that 
is from 1837 to 1842, before the working class had 
accustomed themselves to the altered conditions of poor 
relief ; a new generation which had never experienced the 
advantages of outdoor relief felt the deprivation less 
keenly. But the most important factor in weakening 
the agitation against the New Poor Law was the im- 
proved condition of the people. It was during years of 
business depression, unemployment and consequent pau- 
perism, that the law was most fiercely attacked, for the 
excellent reason that more persons were affected by its 
provisions. As pauperism declined, fewer people were 
concerned over the hardships endured by the paupers. 
The most important element of strength in the move- 
ment was, not the opposition felt towards any particular 
piece of upper-class legislation, but the general misery 
of the people, in which dear food, long hours of labor 
and a niggardly policy of poor relief were only factors, 
however important. It was the return of prosperity 
which did most to satisfy the greatest grievance of the 
people, their poverty. It is true that the workers as- 
cribed their poverty to political conditions ; that was the 
reason why they were Chartists. But they would not 
have been content with any legislation which would have 
left them in such an intolerable condition as prevailed 
till after 1842 ; they would have insisted upon taking part 
in legislation themselves to see if they could not do more 
to better matters than a Parliament representing only 
the well-to-do would dare attempt. The ruling classes 
offered factory reform and free trade as their solution of 
what Carlyle named " the condition of England problem " ; 
a marked improvement in the life of the people was 
needed to convince the country that their remedy was 



409] CAUSE OF THE DECLINE 161: 

sufficiently radical. The Chartists cared for political 
democracy and social reform ; the Chartist leaders cared 
very much. But the most important issue with the mass 
of the party was their livelihood. In 1848 a pamphleteer 
gave his remedy for Chartism : 

Cabineteers, feed the Chartists .... or let them feed them- 
selves, by giving them work, and ye need not fear them. 
They are the most hard-working and hard-headed of the com- 
munity ; but if ye wish to touch their brains, read no homily, 
publish no laws, preach no sermons, call no physical force out, 
— but feed them/ 

A very interesting question, though rather aside from 
the purpose of the present study, is that of how much 
credit the " cabineteers " deserved for the return of 
prosperity. Most historians have credited it to the 
adoption of free trade. Molesworth emphasized the 
beneficial effects of the New Poor Law in reducing the 
amount of pauperism.^ Some have considered that the 
influx of gold from the California mines quieted agitation 
by raising prices for the farmers and wages for the 
operatives at the expense of salaried men and bond- 
holders. The Chartists themselves recognized this factor, 
and one of the leading periodicals expressed the opinion 
that the increased gold supply would practically repeal 
Peel's Currency Act of 1819, so that the fundholder and 
the mortgagee would clamor against being paid in gold 
instead of for it.^ The revolution in the means of com- 
munication through the rapidly increasing utilization of 
steam railways was certainly a factor, and an ^important 

^ T. Styles, The Coming Era (London, 1848), p. 9. 
* Molesworth, History of England from the Year 1830, vol. ii, pp. 
381-2. 
^ Power of the Pence, Jan. 20, 1849. 



l62 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [410 

one, in the increase of national wealth and the consequent 
return of prosperity. 

Whatever may have been the causes of the improve- 
ment in the lot of the w^orking class, the effect is indis- 
putable. As times grew harder the workers turned 
their attention to politics, subscribed to the Northern 
Star and other democratic periodicals, attended mass 
meetings for which unemployment gave them leisure, 
organized in local Chartist societies and projected mon- 
ster petitions. The pulsation of the Chartist movement 
is the best evidence of its real nature. An established 
political party either maintains itself at a uniform degree 
of intensity, excepting perhaps for a gradual increase or 
decrease of strength, or else it concentrates its activity 
within a brief period before the principal elections. But 
a labor agitation will rise from insignificance to over- 
mastering importance within a few weeks following an 
important strike or lock-out or a cut in wages. Chartism 
bore the latter character, and its strength may be said to 
have varied directly with the misery of the people.' Almost 
equally significant evidence that economic factors deter- 
mined the strength and weakness of the movement is the 
variant strength of Chartism not only from time to time 
but from place to place. Rural England was compara- 
tively unaffected by the agitation. Even among the 
factory towns themselves there was great difference in 
the intensity of Chartist propaganda. Engels claimed 
Manchester as the chief center of trades unionism, 
Chartism and Socialism because there the working popu- 
lation had become most thoroughly proletarianized." In 
Birmingham, he thought, the partial independence of the 

^ For the evidence on this head, cf. supra, chaps, ii, iii, iv. 
' Engels, Condition of the Working Class in 1844, p. 240. 



41 1 ] CAUSE OF THE DECLINE 163 

artisans in the metal-wares trades was responsible for the 
lack of collectivist sentiment among the masses of the 
people. "This peculiar midway position of the Birming- 
ham iron-workers is to blame for their having so rarely 
joined wholly and unreservedly in the English labour 
movements. Birmingham is a politically radical but not 
a Chartist town." ' 

The exact correspondence of periods of intense Chart- 
ist activity with industrial depression may, however, be 
said to fail in one particular. There was a slight la^ 
between the worst times and the most marked Chartist 
demonstrations in 1839, ^^ 1848 and possibly in 1842. 
The hard times of 1839 really dated from the American 
panic of 1837, and at the time of the Newport raid and 
the monster petition to Parliament conditions were 
slightly improved. The winter of 1841-2, rather than 
the summer of 1842, seems to have been the time of 
greatest suffering; by August, the time of the political 
strike, the ministry already saw signs of industrial im- 
provement. "^ In 1847 prices were much higher than in 
1848.3 But these facts, so far from disproving the causal 
connection between industrial conditions and Chartist 
activity supply fresh evidence that such connection 
existed. 

A labor agitation, especially on such a scale as the 
Chartist movement, must have some time to gather head 
before it reaches its maximum. It was the coming of 
hard times in 1837 that really created the Chartist move- 
ment : that is, gave demands long familiar to radicals 
such widespread popular support that they acquired 

^Engels, op. cit., p. 199. And yet Birmingham was the favorite 
meeting place for the conferences and conventions of the Chartist 
party; probably because of its central location. 

' Cf. supra, p. 118. ^ Cf. supra, p. 123. 



1 54 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [412 

political importance. But several months of propaganda 
were required to convert the working classes as a whole 
to Chartism. The latter end of a period of depression 
and unemployment is always most apt to be marked by 
violent speech and action, because the long continuance 
of hard times eats into the small capital of a workingman 
and brings him every day nearer to pauperism, even if 
the depression itself is not getting more acute. Thus it 
happened that Chartist demonstrations were most en- 
thusiastically supported at or near the end of the periods 
of greatest distress. Moreover, the periods of the great- 
est Chartist activity were not always the periods when 
the party was really the strongest. In 1847 the move- 
ment was probably much stronger than in 1848. At any 
rate, such is the irresistible conclusion that the student 
of Chartism draws from a comparison of Chartist success 
in the elections of 1847, when O'Connor defeated a Whig 
minister for a seat in the House of Commons, with the 
fiasco of April in the following year. The ill-judged 
revolutionary attempts of a few of the party in 1848 
seem to have been a mere flash in the pan provoked by 
the stimulating examples of rebellious Ireland and revo- 
lutionary France. "" 

Another objection which might be urged against the 
influence of economic conditions upon the fortunes of 
the Chartist movement is that while wages rose rapidly 
in most industries after 1842, in many cases they fell back 
almost to their old figure by 1848.^ The buying power 

^ The Chartists were never good judges of their own relative strength 
or of the proper moment to act. In 1854, after the National Charter 
Association had ceased to exist, Ernest Jones told an audience that 
nothing could prevent the Charter from becoming law within a twelve 
month. Gammage, op. cit., p. 399. 

* Cf. supra, chap, iv, for estimates of wages and prices in different 
years. 



413] CAUSE OF THE DECLINE 165 

of wages was certainly much greater between the depres- 
sion of 1847-8 and the Crimean War than it had been in 
the early ' forties under protection ; but during the period 
of depression high prices prevailed, so that the change 
in real wages from 1842 to 1848 did not exceed the ad- 
vance in nominal wages. But there was a great differ- 
ence between the position of the workers in 1842 and in 
1848. During the decade from 1839 to 1849 the aver- 
age number of hours of labor in a week decreased from 
sixty-nine to sixty in the cotton factories ; ' from sixty- 
five and a third to sixty in the woollen factories;^ from 
sixty-six to sixty in the silk manufacture,^ Such reduc- 
tions in labor are the equivalent of a very marked rise in 
wages, and some surprise was felt that the manufacturers 
could afford to maintain the old rates of pay after having 
been compelled, as the direct or indirect result of legis- 
lative action, to lessen the hours of labor. 

The wages of the hand-loom weavers did not mater- 
ially alter during the years which followed the rise of 
Chartism, and the (nominal) wages of the agricultural 
laborers even declined. "^ But the agricultural laborers 
never formed a very important section of the Chartists ; 
while if the condition of the hand-loom weavers did not 
improve, at least their number decreased so rapidly that 
their wages rate no longer possessed the same signifi- 
cance, ^ With their disappearance as a class, their griev- 
ances disappeared as well. The lot of the agricultural 
laborer improved greatly during the agricultural revival 
of the ' fifties and in almost all branches of manufacture 
wages rose rapidly. Even the miners, who had not 

^Parliamentary Papers, 1887 (c. 5172) Ixxxix, 272, et seq., pp. 47-9, 
^ Ibid., p, 95. ^ Ibid., p. 123. * Cf. supra, p. 131. 

* Cf. supra, p. 131. 



l66 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [414 

shared in the slight general advance in wages of the 
preceding decade, enjoyed an increase of about fifteen 
per cent from 1850 to 1860/ 

The protection given to labor by legislation was greatly 
extended by the vigorous growth of trade-unionism and of 
the co-operative movement. As successors of Chartism 
and heirs to its adherents, these new industrial develop- 
ments will be considered more fully in the last chapter. 
Here it will suffice to mention their double influence upon 
the decline of the Chartist movement. They absorbed 
the energies which had hitherto gone into the struggle for 
political reform. What the workers sought, a reason- 
ably high standard of living, could be, it now seemed to 
them, more readily attained directly in the economic 
field than by the indirect method of first winning the 
suffrage and then improving their lot by legislation. In 
the second place, co-operation and trade-unionism did 
in some degree fulfill the hopes placed upon them and 
may have been thd chief cause of the new prosperity, or 
at least of the share which the working classes enjoyed 
in it. 

The passing of a great movement which had for more 
than a decade engaged almost the entire political activity 
of the miners, factory operatives, machine-shop men, 
hand-loom weavers, and the lower ranks of the industrial 
population generally, is not to be laid to any single cause. 
The Chartist movement was complex in origin, diversi- 
fied in character and consequently hard to trace in its 
disappearance. But the evidence thus far presented 
seems to make it fairly certain that there were three out- 
standing causes of the decline of Chartism : 

'Bowley, Wages in the United Kingdom in the Nineteenth Century, 
appendix. 



415] CAUSE OF THE DECLINE 167 

Among the leaders there was agreement neither upon 
ultimate aims nor immediate policies. By their intense 
factionalism and mutual jealousy they lost the useful, 
perhaps indispensable, sympathy of radicals outside of the 
party and split the party itself time and again on each 
new problem that confronted them. If Chartism could 
have made headway in spite of its internal dissension, it 
could only have been by developing and maintaining a 
strength among the people so formidable as to overawe 
the government and compel at least a partial recogni- 
tion of their claims. 

The movement could not maintain this necessary 
strength because most of those who joined it did so less 
for the sake of political democracy in itself than for the 
removal of particular grievances. The opponents of the 
Corn Laws were satisfied on that score by the free-trade 
victory in 1846; the factory reformers were placated by 
the enactment of the ten-hour day for women and young 
persons in textile factories and the prohibition of the 
labor of women and small children in the mines ; the op- 
ponents of the New Poor Law by slight modifications in 
the law and a decrease in pauperism ; those whose griev- 
ances were on the general score of poverty enjoyed in 
the years which followed the depression of 1842 a slight 
increase in wages, a reduction of hours of labor, and a 
decrease in unemployment. All were impressed by the 
changed attitude of the government towards working- 
class grievances and desires. 

The loss of those who left the Chartist movement 
because of the complete or partial satisfaction of their 
grievances might easily have been made up for by fresh 
recruits from the ranks of the discontented if the depres- 
sion of 1847-8 had not been followed by a very marked 
return of prosperity. The improved conditions in town 



1 68 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [416 

and country in the years following the downfall of 
Chartism reduced the political activity of the working 
classes of Great Britain to a lower level than had been 
known for at least a generation, and prevented the 
revival of a popular agitation for the principles embodied 
in the Charter. 



CHAPTER VI 

The Response of the Ruling Classes of Great Britain 
TO the Chartist Movement 

With the disappearance of Chartism the British working 
classes ceased for a time to contribute leadership to the 
movement for political democracy. Neither the struggle 
for political emancipation nor that for economic betterment 
ceased with the Chartist agitation, but they were no longer 
so intimately united as they had been within the movement. 
The franchise was no less desired than before, but Parlia- 
mentary Radicals such as John Bright became the spokes- 
men for the popular wish and the agitation was carried on 
by the purely political and constitutional methods favored 
by these leaders. The British workingmen, those at least 
who had been associated with Chartism, believed that the 
principles of the Charter would someday be the law of the 
land and that through the instrumentality of a democratic 
Parliament they could better their condition to a degree that 
would be impossible while still unenfranchised. But they 
were unwilling to postpone the hope of better wages, cheaper 
food, shorter hours and better working conditions till such 
time as they coiurolled the government; they were im- 
patient to try what might be accomplished by the purely 
economic methods which they were in a position to employ : 
the organization of labor, co-operative association, the 
savings bank and the " friendly society," collective bargain- 
ing and the strike. This aspect of the labor movement 
also attracted the sympathy of many who were not them- 
417] 169 



lyo THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [418 

selves workingmen, although the trade unions and other 
working class organizations remained for the most part 
under working class control. 

The Chartist movement must be reckoned in many ways 
a failure, but as a demonstration it was a great success. It 
is true that the alarm which the great mass meetings, the 
monster petitions and the reckless language of the party press 
had inspired in conservative breasts gave place to scorn 
when each new crisis passed and there was no revolution. 
But the immediate reaction to some particular phase of 
the movement matters very little. The important fact is 
that the Chartist agitation, considered as a whole, was a 
very impressive chapter in history. However badly led 
and futile in its methods, at least it showed the enfran- 
chised classes in what misery large masses of the British 
people lived and how deep was their discontent with the 
social institutions which made their misery possible. As 
Viscount Ingestre wrote in the preface to Meliora, " now 
we seem to have at last awakened, as from a dream, to the 
real condition of these, the great majority of our fellow 
creatures." ^ Even the humiliating collapse of the great 
demonstration of April tenth 1848, was not received every- 
where with derision. One of the volunteer constables who 
had protected the peace of London on that occasion warned 
the ruling classes that " the man who sees nothing in Chart- 
ism worthy his most serious thought and earnest attention 
is a more unwise person than any Chartist." ^ Edward 
Miall, in his tract on The Suffrage, which went through 

^Meliora (London, 1852-3) vol. i, pp. 11-12. This work consists of 
two volumes of essays on social problems edited by Viscount Ingestre 
(Chas. John Shrewsbury). Among the contributors are various mem- 
bers of the nobility and the established clergy, also physicians, admin- 
istrators, social workers and a few operatives. 

^ A Letter from One of the Special Constables in London (1848), p. 21. 



419] RESPONSE OF THE RULING CLASSES 171 

more than forty editions from 1841 to 1848/ addressed the 
middle classes as one of themselves, justifying the Chartists 
in their desertion of their former allies : 

We left them before they ever dreamed of leaving us. We 
asked their aid to carry the Reform Bill, and they generously 
afforded it. By their means we gained the object which we 
sought, and having gained it, neglected them. We gave them 
the poor law; we said nothing of the corn law. We discour- 
aged agitation; we attached ourselves to the Whigs.^ 

Of course the changed attitude of the upper and middle 
classes of Great Britain towards social problems should not 
be ascribed wholly to the effect of the Chartist movement; 
it was rather a response to the whole labor movement of 
which that agitation was but a phase. Other manifesta- 
tions of the same unrest, Owenism, republicanism, labor 
union violence, incessant " turnouts " in the factory towns 
and rick-burnings in the country, contributed each its share 
to the expression of popular discontent. Before the de- 
mands of the Charter had ever been formulated there was 
evidence enough that Great Britain did not enjoy social 
peace. Men were still active in public life who could re- 
member the Luddite machine breakers, the Peterloo mas- 
sacre, and, in more recent times, the threat of civil war 
which helped carry the Reform Bill in 1832 and the vast in- 
dignation meetings which met all over England to denounce 
the New Poor Law of 1834. If Chartism was more ef- 
fective than other agitations in calling attention to popular 
grievances, it was only because it focussed, as with a burn- 
ing glass, so many movements into one. It was certainly 
the most formidable single movement of the working class 

' Edward Miall, The Suffrage (1848), reprinted from the Nonconform- 
ist in 1841), p. 2. 
^Ibid., p, 3. 



1^2 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [420 

that England had yet known and its lesson was not easily 
forgotten. 

That the response of the ruling classes tO' the labor move- 
ment was not wholly due to fear of revolution, but also to 
a real interest in the welfare of the workers, is shown by the 
Christian Socialist movement which coincided with the last 
years of Chartism. The leaders of Christian Socialism 
had their own quarrel with the existing industrial system 
and they were prepared toi initiate changes as well as to 
accept them. The direct influence of the Chartist move- 
ment upon Christian Socialism, most clearly evident in 
Charles Kingsley's novel of Chartism, Alton Locke, was 
rather in calling attention to the distresses of the people 
than in quickening desire to remedy them. It is true that 
the Christian Socialists had little faith in the Charter as a 
political program and none at all in the Chartist party as an 
organization, but they had every sympathy with the spirit 
that inspired the movement, the resentment of the working 
classes at a social order that would do' nothing for their 
betterment and the hope of a social reconstruction in which 
their desires and interests, would be no longer neglected. 
The Christian Socialists believed that the most hopeful di- 
rection in which the friends of labor could employ their 
energies was to aid and encourage voluntary association 
among the working classes, so that they might themselves 
produce and sell the goods they used, without dependence 
upon factory owner or middleman. The Christian Social- 
ists concentrated their efforts, therefore, upon the co- 
operative movement, but they did not neglect other 
lines of effort — support of the trades unions, the re- 
moval of legal restrictions upon the savings bank and 
the friendly society, and the enactment of more rigor- 
ous laws to regulate factory labor and safeguard the 
health of the towns. 



42 1 ] RESPONSE OF THE RULING CLASSES 173 

No doubt one of the incidental aims of the Christian 
Socialists was to recapture the labor movement for the 
Church. The Owenite Socialists were openly anti-clerical 
and many of the Chartists were quite as much so. This 
seems to have been due in part to the burden of an estab- 
lished church upon the public revenue at a time when the 
degree of poverty was so great that all taxation seemed 
oppression; in part to the teaching of a long succession of 
radical leaders, such as Robert Owen, who rejected Chris- 
tianity on philosophical grounds ; and, most of all, perhaps, 
to the intimate alliance between the greater part of the 
established clergy and the Tory party. Several ministers 
of religion must be numbered among the leaders of the 
Chartists, but with very few exceptions they were dis- 
senters. J. R. Stephens, the fiery opponent of the New 
Poor Law, had been a Wesleyan preacher; Joseph Sturge, 
leader of the Complete Suffrage party, was a Quaker; 
Joseph Barker, editor of the Chartist periodical The People, 
had been a Unitarian minister. The non-conformist Chart- 
ists were numerous and powerful within the party, and 
many Chartist periodicals, such as The Weekly Adviser and 
Artisan's Companion, devoted much of their space to agita- 
tion for the disestablishment of the Church of England. 
Among the other clerical friends of the movement was 
Henry Solly, minister of the Presbyterian church at Yeovil, 
who referred to the Chartist party in 1842 as one of the 
" great bodies of men, who . . . represent the Christianity 
... of the country." ^ But another element in the party, 
represented best by Henry Hetherington and his more mod- 
erate friend G. J. Holyoake, were as much opposed to non- 
conformist Christianity as to the Church of England itself.- 

1 H. Solly, W/iai Says Christianity to the Present Distress? (1842). 
* Cf. G. J. Holyoake, Life and Character of henry Hetherington 
(London, 1849), />a.y«>». 



174 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [422 

The activities of the Christian Socialists can best be traced 
through the pages of The Christian Socialist, edited by 
J. M. Ludlow in 1850 and 185 1. This weekly periodical 
chronicled the achievements of the Society for Promoting 
Working Men's Associations, the hearings before the Par- 
liamentary committee on " Investments for the Savings of 
the Middle and Working Classes," and the attempts made 
to improve the living and working conditions of the poor. 
On the religious side, it published the articles of " Parson 
Lot " (Charles Kingsley), expounding the democratic char- 
acter of Christian theology, of dififerent parts of the 
Bible, and of the history and organization of the Christian 
churches. 

It is not easy to give definite dates for the beginning and 
end of the Christian Socialist movement. A book written 
in 1839 by T. H. Hudson bore the title Christian Socialism, 
but its aim was solely to confute the anti-Christian socialism 
of Robert Owen and it contained little of the positive en- 
thusiasm for radical social reform which marked the later 
movement. Charles Kingsley took an active interest in the 
events of 1848, but the Society for Promoting Working 
Men's Associations was not organized till 1850. In 1854 
the Society ran out of funds and discontinued its efforts.^ 
But the Christian Socialist leaders continued to work as 
individuals for the co-operative movement, and the impetus 
given to the movement by their timely championship is felt 
even today. One of the most important triumphs of the 
Christian Socialists during the few years of the definitely 
organized movement was the Industrial and Provident So- 
cieties Act of 1852,^ introduced in the House of Commons 
by Mr. Slaney and earnestly supported in all its stages by 

^Arthur V. Woodworth, Christian Socialism in England (London. 
1903) > P" 30- This book contains a useful bibliography on ;the subject, 
* 15 and 16 Vict. c. 31. 



423] RESPONSE OF THE RULING CLASSES 175 

the Christian Sociahsts, facilitating the formation of so- 
cieties by voluntary subscription. 

The Christian Socialist leaders befriended the labor 
unions as well as the co-operative societies, though with 
more reservation. With labor properly organized on asso- 
ciative principles, they hoped that the labor union, with the 
inevitable class feeling and class struggle it implied, would 
become obsolete. Under existing conditions, however, the 
trades union should be supported. Edward Vansittart 
Neale, one of the ablest spokesmen of the Christian Social- 
ists, after deploring the necessity for the labor unions added : 

But I must at the same time say, that ... I do believe that 
they have been, in the state of society which exists, the only 
means in very many cases, by which the workmen could make 
a contract w^ith their employers on anything like fair terms, 
and exercise over against them that individual liberty for 
which the employers profess so much regard.^ 

The Christian Socialists gave very practical evidence of 
their sympathy with the labor movement during the strike 
of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers in 1852. On 
the first day of the year the engineers struck against over- 
time and piecework.^ Their employers not only refused all 
attempts to arrange an arbitration of the matters in dispute, 
but insisted that since the question was one of their own 
property and their own workmen the well-meaning outsiders 
who suggested mediation had better not interfere.^ They 
intimated furthermore that in their opinion the trades union 
was an intolerable nuisance in the industrial world and for 

^E. Vansittart Neale, May £ Not Do What I Will with My Own? 
(1852), p. 15. 

* For the strike see Sidney and Beatrice Webb, The History of Trade 
Unionism (London, 191 1), pp. 196-8. 

' Representation of fhe Case of the Executive Committee of ihe Cen- 
tral Association of Employers of Operative Engineers (1852), passim. 



1^6 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [424 

their part they did not intend to offer employment in the 
future to any member of a union. This " Representation " 
stirred the Christian Socialists to indignant action. During 
the year three separate replies appeared: E. Vansittart 
Neale's May I Not Do What I Will with My Ownf, the 
reverend Charles Kingsley's Who Are the Friends of 
Order?, and J. M. Ludlow's lectures delivered before the 
Society for Promoting Working Men's Associations, pub- 
lished under the title of The Master Engineers and their 
Workmen. The Christian Socialists did not content them- 
selves with publicly championing the strikers, but attempted 
to support the strike by subscribing to the union funds. The 
engineers were forced to give in at last, however, and the 
aid so freely rendered by the Christian Socialists accom- 
plished nothing unless we count as a gain the prestige the 
incident won for them among the workingmen of Great 
Britain. 

The Chartists viewed the Christian Socialist movement 
variously, taking particular interest in the projects for in- 
stituting co-operative associations among the working 
classes. Thomas Cooper welcomed the movement, com- 
mending especially the Working Tailors' Association in 
which Charles Kingsley and F. D. Maurice had been ac- 
tively interested.^ Others were more doubtful of the new 
ventures. The National Instructor feared that small volun- 
tary associations could never successfully compete with the 
existing great concentrations of capital in the hands of the 
factory owners." Ernest Jones roundly denounced the 
whole movement as futile and reactionary. He conducted 
a vigorous controversy in the columns of his personal organ, 
Notes to the People, with both E. Vansittart Neale and 

1 Cooper's Journal, Feb. 16, 1850. 
"^ National Instructor, Oct. 19, 1850. 



425] RESPONSE OF THE RULING CLASSES lyy 

Charles Kingsley/ But few even of those Chartists who 
held that voluntary co-operation was a delusive remedy for 
the evils of the time cast any doubt upon the good faith of 
the Christian Socialists and the sincerity of their ejfforts to 
ameliorate social conditions. This was not only greatly 
to the credit of the men who could inspire such confidence, 
but it was important as a sign of the times. The earlier 
Chartists had held no such charitable views of the Anti-Corn 
Law League and of other reform organizations which com- 
peted with the Charter for popular favor; the accepted 
theory was that such movements were so many deliberate 
attempts to distract the attention and misdirect the efforts 
of the workers. 

The Christian Socialist movement was but one manifesta- 
tion of the new attitude of the enfranchised classes toward 
social reform. Free trade and Factory Acts were perhaps 
the most important reforms achieved during the period of 
Chartist agitation, but they were by nO' means all. Friedrich 
Engels early noted the change from an attitude in Parlia- 
ment of determined resistance to popular demands to one of 
cautious concessions, and remarked that " the last session 
of 1844 was a continuous debate upon subjects affecting the 
working-class, the Poor Relief Bill, the Factory Act, the 
Masters' and Servants' Act; and Thomas Duncombe, the 
representative of the workingmen in the House of Com- 
mons, was the great man of the session." ^ In 1847 R- A. 
Slaney, then Commissioner for the Health of Towns, urged 
that Parliament establish a national board or commission 
to study the needs of the working class. ^ Greater interest 
was taken in the question of public education, which was 

'^ Notes to the People, vol. i (1851), 470-6; vol. ii (1852), pp. 606-9. 

"Engels, Condition of the Working Class in 1844, p, 17. 

' R. A. Slaney, A Plea for the Working Classes (1847), p. 144 et seq. 



178 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [426 

probably more poorly organized in Great Britain than in 
any other country of comparable wealth and civilization/ 
From 1839 to 1845, the period of greatest Chartist activity, 
the evidence of the marriage registers indicates that thirty- 
three per cent of the adult men and forty-nine per cent of 
the adult women in England and Wales were unable to 
write their names. ^ Much was done by private enterprise 
to better the situation, and by 1850 there were in existence 
702 " Mechanics Institutes ", which gave instruction to 
over a hundred and twenty thousand working men and 
women.^ 

Many reformers believed that the unfortunate condition 
of the poor in the great towns could only be remedied by 
assisting the surplus population either to settle in the coun- 
try or find homes in a new land. From 1846 to 1854 in- 
clusive the emigration from the United Kingdom amounted 
to more than two and a half-millions.* So many Chartists 
left England during this period that, as H. M. Hyndman ex- 
pressed it, the " leaders of the democratic army were left, 
so to say, without either non-commissioned officers or 
veteran troops."^ Much of this was assisted emigration, 
and there were those who saw in the encouragement given 
by wealthy Englishmen to the emigration of the poor, an at- 
tempted substitute for the social justice which would assure 
to every Englishman a comfortable home in his own 

' Joseph Kay, The Social Condition and the Education of the People 
in England and Europe, 2 vols. (1850) contrasts the education of the 
poor and the prevaiHng land system in England with the better condi- 
tions in some continental countries, Germany in particular. 

' Parliamentary Papers, 1847-8 (967) xxv, i et seq. 

* M. Nadaud, Histoire des Classes ouvriires en Angleterre (Paris, 
1872), p. 207. 

* Hyndman, Historical Basis of Socialism in England, p. 268. 
^ Ibid., p. 265. 



427] RESPONSE OF THE RULING CLASSES lyg 

country. Richard Oastler, the old-fashioned Tory demo- 
crat, saw the matter in this Hght and, in his paper The 
Champion (1850-1), varied his attacks upon the factory 
system and the inadequate law of poor relief with diatribes 
against the advocates of emigration. The period of great- 
est emigration did not, however, much outlast the Chartist 
movement. From 1854 to i860 the emigration from Great 
Britain decreased rather steadily from 116,838 to 35,154; 
the Irish emigration from 150,209 to 60,835/ 

The exceptionally heavy Irish emigration after the potato 
famine of 1846 was not without its effect upon the labor 
movements of Great Britain. In the first place it relieved 
the economic pressure of the dense agrarian population in 
Ireland upon the United Kingdom. Throughout the 'forties 
the standard of living was even lower in Ireland than in 
Great Britain, and thousands of Irish peasants left their 
country tO' settle in the slums of Manchester, Liverpool and 
other manufacturing towns and commercial ports, where 
they could make sure of a job by underbidding British work- 
ingmen and thus lowering the general average of British 
wages. In the second place emigration broke the intimate 
connection between the popular movements in the two coun- 
tries which was so marked during the Chartist period. 
Chartism was a British movement, but Irish laborers 
in Great Britain supported it and even supplied it with lead- 
ers, such as James Bronterre O'Brien and Feargus O'Con- 
nor, who had once contested the leadership of the Irish 
party with Daniel O'Connell. The Chartist petition of 
1842 advocated the repeal of the legislative union between 
Great Britain and Ireland,"^ and the National Assembly of 
1848 also passed a resolution endorsing repeal.^ William 

^ Parliamentary Papers, 1868-9, i. 487, (397)- 

^English Chartist Circular, vol. i, p. 158. 

* Gam mage, History of the Chartist Movement, p. 328. 



l8o THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [428 

Lovett and other Chartists urged the Irish not to trust in 
O'Connell and his Whig friends, but to join the democracy 
of Great Britain in a common struggle against the British 
aristocracy/ Many of the Chartist periodicals, notably 
Joseph Barker's The People, devoted a great deal of space 
to the insurrectionary attempts of John Mitchell and others 
in the years of disturbance which followed the famine. 
After the decline of the Chartist movement, however, the 
agitation for Irish independence was quite independent of 
contemporary political events in Great Britain, at least till 
Gladstone decided to add Home Rule to the Liberal platform. 
This loss to British democrats of their Irish contingent 
was not wholly a bad thing for the British labor movement. 
The entente between the Irish Repealers and the Chartists 
cost the latter the support and sympathy of many who' might 
otherwise have shown sympathy for their cause. At this 
time the hatred of the Irish for the English, whom they re- 
garded as oppressors, was repaid by a very hearty contempt 
on the part of the English (the Chartists were an isolated 
exception) for what they regarded as the untrustworthiness 
and unfitness for self-government of the Irish race. Even 
men as well disposed to Chartism as Kingsley and Carlyle 
believed that the movement could come to no good so long 
as it was dominated by Irish leaders.^ Others who had no 
particular prejudice against the Irish as a people were fright- 
ened or disgusted by the agrarian outrages which marked 
the course of the agitation for repeal. They hoped that the 
passing of Chartism meant the passing of Irish influence in 
working class politics, and no longer held aloof from British 
labor movements. 

* The Radical Reformers of England, Scotland and Wales to the 
Irish People (no date). 

* Notice especially Kingsley's attitude toward the Irish Chartists in 
Alton Locke. 



429] RESPONSE OF THE RULING CLASSES 181 

With the Chartist movement disappeared the hope of any 
immediate reconstruction of the poHtical system of Great 
Britain. But the attitude of the Liberal and Conservative 
parties toward poHtical reform had by 1848 undergone a 
marked change. The provisions of the Charter were no 
longer regarded as outside practical politics, but both parties 
took them into serious consideration. As it was rather 
cynically expressed in the Sozial-Demokratische BihUothek, 
"As Chartism was dead, that is the workingmen no longer 
pressed as a class for the extension of their political rights, 
there lay no more danger for the bourgeoisie in the demands 
of the Charter." ^ The royal address on February 3, 1852, 
for the first time since the Reform Bill of 1832 promised 
definite action on the part of the government to modify 
the electoral system : 

It appears to Me that this is a fitting Time for calmly con- 
sidering whether it may not be advisable to make such Amend- 
ments in the Act of the late Reign relating to the Representa- 
tion of the Commons in Parliament as may be deemed calcu- 
lated to carry into more complete Eft'ect the Principles upon 
which that Law is founded." 

Li accordance with the pledge which he had made. Lord 
John Russell introduced on February ninth a measure of 
reform.^ His bill provided for a five-pound borough fran- 
chise, a general forty-shilling-tax franchise for counties and 
boroughs, in the counties a five-pound copyholder or lease- 
holder franchise and a twenty-pound occupier franchise. 
For Scotland the provisions were similar; but there was no 
change in the Irish county franchise although a five-pound 
franchise was proposed for Irish boroughs. In March the 

^Die Chartistenbewegung in England, p. 41. 
^Hansard, 3rd series, vol. cxix, p. 6. 
^ Ibid., pp. 252-68. 



l82 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [430 

new measure was postponed for three months ^ and after the 
defeat oi the Russell ministry on a militia bill the project 
was dropped. 

From 1848 onwards John Bright and the other middle- 
class Radicals agitated for a program of political reform, 
sometimes nicknamed the " Little Charter," which included 
household suffrage, the ballot, triennial Parliaments, more 
equal electoral districts and no property qualifications for 
membership in the House of Commons.^ The Radicals 
did not, however, obtain sufficient support among the general 
public to ensure success. One Chartist periodical laid the 
public apathy, perhaps with justice, to the rise of new issues 
which distracted attention from the struggle for the fran- 
chise: "At the present moment Chartism has no hold upon 
public opinion . . . Next to ' Papal Aggression,' and ' the 
Great Exhibition,' the public mind is occupied with the Co- 
operative experiments, the revival of Trades' Unions, and 
the warlike aspect of affairs in Germany." ^ At any rate, 
the next attempt to reform the franchise, made in 1854, 
met with even less favor than the bill of two years earlier.* 
The Radical leaders and Benjamin Disraeli among the Con- 
servatives wished to proceed with it, but Lord John Russell 
decided to postpone the projected reform until a more favor- 
able time. He expressed himself, however, as personally 
a reformer and laid his change of heart to the events of 
1848: 

I thought . . . that the temper, the moderation, and the good 

^Hansard, 3rd series, vol. cxix, p. 971. 

*See for example J. Bright and R. J. Richardson, A New Movement 
(1848). 

^ The Red Republican, Nov. 23, 1850. 

* Only eleven petitions were received on the measure and only four of 
those were favorable. Hansard, 3rd series, vol. cxxxii, p. 840. 



43 1 ] RESPONSE OF THE RULING CLASSES 183 

sense which were shown by the people of this country in 1848, 
demonstrated . . . that large classes of the people who yet had 
no votes were fit for the franchise, and that by being brought 
within the pale of the representation they would confer a 
benefit upon our institutions.^ 

As a further proof of the good- will of the ministry to the 
British laboring classes, Viscount Palmerston, then Secre- 
tary of State, informed the House of Commons that the 
three Chartists, Frost, Williams and Jones, implicated in 
the Monmouth insurrection of 1839, had received a full 
pardoQ.^ 

The intrusion of the problems of foreign policy into 
British political life greatly hampered and delayed the work 
of the reformers. After the continental revolutions of 1848 
and the subsequent wars and repressions, the Chartists them- 
selves devoted most of their attention to events beyond the 
Channel.^ This was true in an even greater degree of the 
middle classes. The picturesque personality of Lord Pal- 
merston, his vigor and adroitness as an orator, and perhaps 
a slight touch of the demagogue in his make up, won for 
him the nickname of " the Feargus O'Connor of the middle 
classes." * It would hardly be too much to say that many 
who counted themselves good Liberals found in the dash 
and daring of Palmerston's diplomacy a satisfactory substi- 
tute for the troublesome labor of political agitation at home. 
The Crimean War in 1854 and the Sepoy insurrection in 
1857 very naturally occupied the attention of Parliament 
and the public while they lasted, and it was not until after 
the immediate excitement over these stirring events had 
ceased that political agitation was again possible. "As re- 

' Hansard, 3rd series, vol. cxxxi, p. 307. ^ Ibid., p. 448. 

^ Cf. infra, pp. 199-204. 

* J. Morley, Life of Richard Cobden (London, 1881), p. 568. 



1 84 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [432 

gards the subject of Parliamentary Reform," wrote John 
Eardley-Wilmot to Lord Brougham in 1857, " it is manifest 
that the public mind does not entertain expectation upon it 
now in the same degree as it did before the commencement 
of the war with Russia." ^ 

Nevertheless the year 1858 saw one of the six points of 
the Charter at last made law. In that year the property 
qualification for membership in Parliament was abolished,^ 
and it was remarked in both the House of Commons and 
the House of Lords that the measure was one which, had 
been advocated a decade earlier by the Chartists.^ The re- 
form of the suffrage which came in 1 867 increased the num- 
ber of voters from 1,352,970 to 2,243,259 (the number in 
1870).* The Reform Bill of 1884 added some two milHon 
more voters.'^ Excepting only a few of the very poor, the 
United Kingdom to-day has universal manhood suffrage, al- 
though the existence of the plural vote based on the owner- 
ship of property in different constituencies acts as an import 
ant check upon the democratic character of the suffrage. 
Both of the Reform Acts, in 1867 and in 1884, were ac- 
companied by an extensive redistribution of seats, thus 
approximating the Chartist demand for equal electoral dis- 
tricts. The system of vote by ballot was established in 
1872.® The demand for annual Parliaments has never been 
met, but a concession has been made in that direction by the 
enactment of a quinquennial law.^ Members of the House 
of Commons have received pay for their services since 191 1. 
Three points of the Charter have been wholly accomplished 
and all have received recognition and substantial fulfilment. 

^John E, Eardley-Wilmot, A Letter to Lord Brougham (1857), p. 8. 

*By the 21 and 22 Vict. c. 26. 

^Hansard, 3rd series, vol. cl, p. 1507 and p. 2089. 

*Rose, Rise ot Democracy, p. 179. ^Ibid., p. 206. 

«By the 35 and 36 Vict, c. 33. ' i and 2 Geo. V. c. 13. 



433] RESPONSE OF THE RULING CLASSES 185 

But the Chartist movement might justly have been reck- 
oned a failure if nothing that it aimed to accomplish except 
the Charter itself had been established in England. The 
Charter in its essentials is today part of the British con- 
stitution, but this is less important than the triumph of many 
of the social and economic reforms for which the Chartists 
chiefly desired it. Certain phases of Chartism, it is true, 
have no modern equivalent. There has never been, for ex- 
ample, any important political group in Great Britain since 
the disappearance of Chartism with the tendency towards 
republicanism which characterized that movement. But the 
Chartist theories on regulation of industry, on taxation and 
on the land question, are today in far greater favor among 
both economists and practical politicians than in their own 
day. Systems of national insurance, of old age pensions, 
of workingmen's compensation, and, in some measure, of 
wage regulation, have placed British industry on a trans- 
formed basis. ^ The worst of the slums have been cleaned 
up by public health legislation, and much has been done by 
the municipalities tO' solve the housing question. The ab- 
sorption of wealth by death duties and a heavily graduated 
income tax has made a beginning of that redistribution of 
wealth which the Chartists advocated. The British land 
monopoly has not been broken up, but it maintains a pre- 
carious existence against an increasing weight of taxation 
frankly directed to that end. In Ireland Gladstone estab- 
lished security for the tenant, and even the Conservatives, 
under the influence of George Wyndham, have done their 
part to transform the tenant into a freeholder. In the earlier 
part of the nineteenth century economists and statesmen 
agreed that large-scale farming on a capitalistic basis was 
superior both economically and socially to the peasant pro- 

^ Cf. C. H. Hayes, British Social Politics (New York, 1913) for a 
summary of recent social legislation. 



1 86 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [434 

prietorship: Today the leading men of both political parties 
have come around to the Chartist opinion of the value of the 
small farm, and land policies differ chiefly on the question 
of how this desirable change should be brought about. 

The reconstruction of the Liberal and Conservative parties 
in the face of the radical movement among the people bears 
some analogy to the Counter-Reformation of the Catholic 
Church when confronted by the Protestant Revolt. Noth- 
ing was openly yielded to the Chartists simply because of 
their demand; on the contrary, the leaders of both of the 
great parties represented in Parliament remained for many 
years hostile to the Charter and still more so to the working- 
class organization which agitated for it. But the attitude 
of mere resistance was abandoned, repression was accom- 
panied by reform and the grievances of the unrepresented 
received increasing consideration. The economic and poli- 
tical changes demanded by the Chartists were one by one 
conceded, slowly and inadequately to be sure, but with a 
certain inevitableness. Lord John Russell, Sir Robert Peel 
and Lord Palmerston were conservative by instinct, what- 
ever their party affiliations, but their conservatism expressed 
itself rather in tempering and modifying radical programs 
than in contesting them. The movement towards social 
and political reform was, however, greatly hastened by the 
rise to leadership of Benjamin Disraeli, William Ewart 
Gladstone and other men in both party organizations who 
could not only follow public opinion but could lead it 
as well. 

Disraeli, like his contemporaries in statecraft the Emperor 
Napoleon and Chancellor Bismarck, believed that aristo- 
cracy could never be secure until the poor man, too, felt 
that he had a " stake in the country." Although he stood 
with the firmest Tories against the Corn Law repeal cham- 
pioned by Sir Robert Peel, he sympathized not a little with 
the Chartists and shared to the full their contempt for the 



435] RESPONSE OF THE RULING CLASSES 187 

Whigs as traitors to the cause of the people which they 
professed to champion. He knew that so long as the Radi- 
cals in the Liberal party were restrained by the large and 
very wealthy Whig element, a Conservative statesman could 
outbid them for popular support without losing the support 
of his own party. He knew also, what no Chartist seems 
ever to have realized, that the enfranchisement of the British 
working classes might not necessarily result in a more radi- 
cal House of Commons. By following the general outlines 
of policy which he laid down, the Conservative party has. 
been able to maintain its hold upon a large part of the labor- 
ing population, especially in London and the seaport towns, 
— at the cost of accepting political democracy and programs 
of social reform with their implications and consequences. 

Gladstone, unlike Disraeli, started his political career with 
very little sympathy for the popular unrest which found ex- 
pression in Chartism. But his successes in free-trade finance 
brought him into closer touch and sympathy with the Radi- 
cals than Disraeli ever experienced. He understood, as 
Disraeli never did, the Radical attitude (which was also 
the Chartist) to international politics, its indifference to the 
ascendancy of Great Britain in the Empire and of the British 
Empire in the concert of the powers, and its intense pre- 
occupation with the cause of liberal government in all parts 
of the earth, even where British interests were not directly 
involved. His gradual conversion to democracy kept even 
step with that of the Liberal party, which found itself com- 
mitted by the time of his death to the political policies of the 
Radicals and to an ambitious program of social legislation 
without a parallel in the demands of any numerous political 
party in English history with the single exception of the 
Chartists. The Socialists and trades unions have succeeded 
in organizing a labor party which might have played as 
militantly class conscious a role in our times as did the 
Chartists in the 'forties, had not the Liberal party reduced 
it to dependence by borrowing extensively from its policies. 



CHAPTER VII 

The Permanent Influence of Chartism on the 
British Working Class. 

The gradual abandonment of the Chartist movement 
after 1842 impHed no decrease of class consciousness 
among the workingmen of Great Britain and no relaxa- 
tion of their effort to better their condition. The un- 
doubted improvement in the conditions of life and labor 
in the years which followed the industrial depression of 
1842 was only a relative improvement after all. It was 
not so much that the exceptional prosperity of those 
years weakened the Chartist movement as that the ex- 
ceptional misery of the preceding period had created the 
movement and was alone able to maintain it. In many 
branches of industry wages were still very inadequate, 
hours of labor excessively long, and abuses of the em- 
ployer's power, such as the " truck " system or the pay- 
ment of wages in goods from the company store, ^ widely 
prevalent. But the further struggle of the British poor 
against the social conditions which limited and oppressed 
them was largely transferred from the political to the 
economic field. This new phase of the labor movement 
was, however, greatly aided and strengthened by the 
training in independent action as a class which the Brit- 
ish workingman had learned in the Chartist agitation. 

We have the testimony of many Chartists as proof of 
the popular weariness of purely political agitation. In 

'Prohibited in 1887 by the 50 and 51 Vict. c. 46. 
188 [436 



437] PERMANENT INFLUENCE OF CHARTISM 189 

1851 Ernest Jones admitted that "Every year the revo- 
lutionary element has become more languid — every year 
it has sought some more quiescent means of elevation." ^ 
For his own part, however, Jones wholly deplored this 
spirit of indifference and believed that he could stir the 
people again to revolutionary zeal. Other reformers, 
who believed in the rightfulness of the Charter as fully 
as Ernest Jones, rather rejoiced that the masses were 
interesting themselves in matters more directly vital than 
mere political privileges. " The true solution of the 
grand social problem of the age," wrote a working-class 
periodical in 1852, ''is the union of Capital and Labour. 
Until this be effected, mere political and parliamentary 
reforms will yield a very trifling and unsatisfactory amount 
of substantial benefit to the masses of the nation." ^ 
The new spirit is also well illustrated by a radical pam- 
phlet of 1855 : 

Manhood suffragfe must be the cry and watchword ; but let 
the agitation for manhood suffrage be honest and rational — 
let the people be honestly told from the outset, that the object 
of universal suffrage is to get honest laws passed upon Land, 
Credit, Currency and Exchange, that shall rescue the work- 
ing-classes from the domination of Landlords and rapacious 
profitmongers.' 

The chief of the " more quiescent means of elevation " 
referred to by Ernest Jones were the co-operative move- 
ment and trades-unionism. The co-operative movement 
began with the weavers of Rochdale, who founded a 
grocery for themselves and their families with only inci- 

^ Notes to the People, p. 3. 

^The Weekly Adviser and Artizan' s Companion, Feb. 7, 1852. 

^ National Reform Tract, no. 5 (1855). 



I go THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [43g 

dental sales to the outside public. This enterprise was 
launched on December 21, 1844, under the association 
name of the " Equitable Pioneers," and began business 
on a capital of £28 and with no supplies on hand but 
flour, butter, sugar and oatmeal/ Each member held 
and paid for four one-pound shares and received five per- 
cent interest on his investment ; the remaining profits be- 
ing divided among purchasers in proportion to the money- 
spent by each.^ The new enterprise prospered remark- 
ably. In 1850 the Equitable Pioneers added to their 
grocery department a corn-mill society, in imitation of 
co-operative mills already existing in Leeds and Halifax,^ 
and, in later years, drapery, butchering, shoemaking, 
clogging and tailoring branches.^ The number of mem- 
bers in the association increased from the original twenty- 
eight in 1844 to 680 by 1852 and to 3450 in 1860.5 The 
success of the Rochdale experiment stimulated the co- 
operative movement in other parts of England, particu- 
larly during the early 'fifties when the Society for 
Promoting Working Men's Associations was active. In 
the summer of 1850 there were only some fifty co- 
operative associations in existence ; within two years 
there were about 250 with a total membership of 150,- 
000.^ 

The co-operative movement did not fulfill all the hopes 
of its founders. Measurably successful in the field of 

'Geo. J. Holyoake, History of Co-operation in Rochdale (1872, 
seventh edition), pp. 12-13. 

^Ibid., p. 36. 

""Ibid., p. 27. ^Ibid., p. 32. 

^G. J. Holyoake, History of Co-operation in England, 2 vols. (Lon- 
don, 1879), vol. ii, p. 50. 

^V. A. Huber. Uber die co-operativen Arbeiterassociationen in 
England (1852), p. 26. 



439] PERMANENT INFLUENCE OF CHARTISM igi 

retail trade, the voluntary associations have never become 
a major factor in manufacture. But, however limited its 
sphere of usefulness might be, so far as it went the co- 
operative movement was a real boon to the British 
workingman. It gave him in many cases cheaper and 
better food and clothes, in some cases a good investment 
for his savings, and, in almost all cases, a valuable train- 
ing in associated effort. A similar example of voluntary 
collective action was the increase in the number of 
" friendly societies " and benefit societies. During the 
two decades following the Reform Bill of 1832, 13,732 
such associations were formed with a total of about four 
million members.' 

Several of the Rochdale Pioneers were Chartists, ^ and 
the Chartist party as a whole came in the end to favor 
the co-operative movement and even to claim that the 
idea originated with them. ^ But even the more liberal 
spirited of the party who had not, like Ernest Jones, 
taken an openly hostile attitude towards the voluntary 
associations were sorry to witness the disappearance of 
the old enthusiasm for political rights before more im- 
mediately practical concerns and considered that the im- 
provement of the material condition of the workingman 
was hardly sufficient compensation for the narrowing of 
his intellectual interests. Thomas Cooper drew a very 
graphic picture of the difference between the Lancashire 
operative of the 'forties and the man of the same class in 
1872: 

In our old Chartist times, it is true, Lancashire working 

^ Webb, History of Trade Unionism, p. 160. 

^The proof of this is afforded by the biographical sketches of the 
founders of the movement given in Holj^oake, History of Co-operation 
in Rochdale, part ii, pp. 6-9. 

'^ Ibid., p. 4. 



IQ2 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [440 

men were in rags by thousands ; and many of them often 
lacked food. But their intelHgence was demonstrated where- 
ever you went. You would see them in groups discussing 
the great doctrine of political justice — that every grown-up 
sane man ought to have a vote in the election of the men to 
make the laws by which he was to be governed ; or they were 
in earnest dispute respecting the teachings of Socialism. 
Now, you will see no such groups in Lancashire. But you 
will hear well-dressed working men talking, as they walk with 
their hands in their pockets, of " Co-ops" (Co-operative 
Stores), and their shares in them, or in building societies.^ 

During the later years of Chartist activity there was a 
considerable revival of trades-unionism, which had been 
at a rather low ebb during the industrial depression of 
1842 and the years immediately preceding.^' So long as 
the Chartist leaders could hope to control the unions 
they viewed their growth with favor and even took an 
active part in helping it forward. W. P. Roberts, a 
friend of Feargus O'Connor and legal adviser of his land 
bank, was for a time solicitor for the Northumberland 
and Durham Miners' Union and, after 1844, legal adviser 
of the Miners' Association of Great Britain and Ireland.^ 
O'Connor's own periodical, the Northern Star, was long 
the official organ of the National Association of United 
Trades as well as of the Chartist party."* This National 
Association, founded in 1845, was an ambitious attempt 
to organize the whole of the British working class into 
one industrial association as the Chartists had aimed to 
unite all of that class into one political party. Thomas 
Duncombe, a Radical member of the House of Commons, 

^Life of Thomas Cooper, p. 393. 

' Cf. supra, p. 45. 

'Webb, op. cit., p. 164. 

* Schliiter, Die Chartistenbetuegung , p. 291 . 



441 ] PERMANENT INFLUENCE OF CHARTISM 193 

championed in Parliament both the Chartists and the 
National Association of United Trades. But the hopes 
founded on the Association were destined to disappoint- 
ment. A costly and unsuccessful strike of the tin-plate 
workers at Wolverhampton crippled it, ' and the panic 
of 1847 together with the " political excitements of 1848," 
which distracted the attention of the workers to political 
issues and thus caused an "apathy which was particularly 
observable during the year 1849,"^ completed the de- 
struction. After 185 1 the Association ceased to be of 
any importance. 

The failure of the National Association of United 
Trades put an end to the attempt to centralize many 
different branches of industry into a single organization 
and caused the labor leaders to concentrate their atten- 
tion upon increasing the efificiency of each individual 
association. The most important organization of the 
new type was the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, 
formed in 1850 from the Journeymen Steam-Engine 
Makers' and Machine Makers' Society! and many local 
unions incorporated with it.^ By October 185 1 the 
Amalgamated Society numbered 11,000 dues-paying 
members, and a few weeks later it tested its strength in 
a great strike."* The strike was hardly successful, but it 
did not permanently hamper the growth of the Society, 
which doubled its membership during the next ten 
years.* Other trades hastened to copy the example thus 

^ Webb, op. cit., p. 176. 

* Report of the Sixth Annual Conference of the National Association 
of United Trades, 1850. 

* Webb, op cit., pp. 186-95. 

* For the attitude of the Christian Socialists toward the 'engineers cf. 
supra, pp. 175-6. 

^Webb, op. cit., p. 208. 



1^4 ^^^ DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [442 

set ; in fact, it has been claimed that " scarcely a trade 
exists which did not, between 1852 and 1857, either 
attempt to imitate the whole constitution of the Amalga- 
mated Engineers, or incorporate one or another of its 
characteristic features." ^ 

In 1853 the Lancashire cotton spinners formed their 
present association,^ and in the same year there was a 
great strike at the Preston cotton mills. At one time 
as many as 17,000 operatives were out of work^ and the 
strike, which began on the first of November in 1853, did 
not come to an end till the thirteenth of the following 
April. 3 The estimated cost of the strike to the em- 
ployers was £165,000; to the strikers and others affected 
by the stoppage of the cotton mills, £368,250.'* In the 
same year (1853) the Kidderminster carpet weavers and 
the Dowlais iron workers attempted turn-outs with 
similar lack of success. ^ These strike failures caused a 
marked reaction against the policy which had led to them 
and for several years it was an accepted axiom of the labor 
unions, except perhaps in some of the building trades, 
that a strike was a disaster to be avoided wherever 
possible. The trades unions took full advantage of the 
years of comparative industrial peace which followed the 
Crimean War to increase their numbers and strengthen 
their financial resources, with the result that when the 
next great strikes occurred they were far better able to 
meet the strain of temporary unemployment. In 1858 
the coal miners near Leeds struck against a threatened 
fifteen per-cent reduction in their wages and succeeded 

'Webb, op. ciL, pp. 204-5, 

* Henry Ashworth, The Preston Strike (1854), p. 25. 

^ Ibid., p. 'JT. 

*'Ibid., p. 76. 

'Webb, op. cit., p. 206. 



443] PERMANENT INFLUENCE OF CHARTISM 195 

in arranging a compromise on the basis of a seven and a 
half per-cent decrease,' This strike resulted in the forma- 
tion of a permanent union. In 1859 and i860 a great 
building-trades strike for a nine-hour day was compro- 
mised, and as a result two new unions were founded, the 
London Trades Council and the Amalgamated Society of 
Carpenters.'' The builders' strike was a notable sign of 
the solidarity of sentiment which had grown up among 
the difierent trades, as more than twenty-three thousand 
pounds were subscribed by other labor organizations to 
the strikers' fund. 

The later development of trade-unionism, which aimed 
at the separate organization of each craft and ignored 
political agitation, was unwelcome to the stricter Chartist 
leaders. Feargus O'Connor deserted the trade-unionist 
cause with which he had been so long identified and de- 
clared in 1849 that the unions were an obstacle to the 
winning of the Charter. ^ Ernest Jones denounced the 
labor unions as he had the co-operative societies and, in- 
deed, all other attempts to organize the working class on 
anything less than the national basis. In 185 1 he wrote: 

The Trades' Union has been the greatest upholder (uninten- 
tionally) of the present system. It has made workings-men 
uphold it and defend it, by teaching them to believe that their 
wages could be kept up without a political change. It has 
been one of the most anti-democratic institutions of the 
modem time.* 

But such protests were of no avail to check the growth 

^ G. Howell, Labour Legislation, Labour Movements and Labour 
Leaders (New York, 1902), pp. 115-6. 
'Webb, op. cit., pp. 210-13. 
' Schliiter, Die Chartistenbewegung , p. 293. 
'^ Notes to the People, p. 422. 



ig6 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [444 

of trades-unionism. Ernest Jones lost supporters for 
the charter by his uncompromising stand, and he gained 
no converts from the unions to make these losses good. 
Not only the co-operative associations and the labor 
unions, but the Socialists also, found the bulk of their re- 
cruits in the class of workingmen who had taken part in 
the Chartist propaganda. Indeed, the Chartist move- 
I ment itself was largely akin in spirit to the proletarian 

Socialism of Karl Marx ; and, while few of the Chartist 
leaders except Ernest Jones and Julian Harney accepted 
the entire Marxian theory and program, "^ there were few 
elements of "scientific Socialism " which had not been 
independently worked out by one or another of the 
Chartists. Friedrich Engels made a careful study of 
Chartism during his residence in England,^ and the 
Communist Manifesto (which was given due publicity by 
the Chartists ^ ) recognized in Chartism rather than in 
Owenite Socialism the true manifestation of the revolu- 
tionary spirit of the British proletariat. Herman Schlii- 
ter, the Socialist historian of the Chartist movement, 
contends that Ferdinand Lassalle, the leader of German 
Socialism, was greatly influenced by his knowledge of 
Chartism.'^ The influence of the Chartist movement on 
Socialism in England was probably even greater than its 
reflex influence upon continental Socialism, but it was 
not so immediately effective ; since nearly a generation 
elapsed between the close of the Chartist movement and 

' Schliiter, op. cit., p. 188. In 1869 Engels declared that Jones was 
the only prominent English politician of his time who wholly and com- 
pletely understood the Socialist movement. Ibid., p. 345. 

' Cf. Engels, Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, 
passim. 

* The text of the Communist Manifesto was printed in The Red Re- 
publican, November 9, 1850. 
*Z?zV Chartistenbewegung , p. 247. 



445] PERMANENT INFLUENCE OF CHARTISM jgy 

the organization of the Social Democratic Federation in 
i88i.^ 

A few examples of Chartist theory will serve to show 
the likeness between certain aspects of the movement and 
the contemporary Socialism of France and Germany. 
Ernest Jones stated the Marxian theory of value when 
he asserted : " Money-capital did not create labor, but 
labor created money-capital ; machinery did not create 
work, but work created machinery. It therefore fol- 
lows, that labour is, by its own nature, the sovereign 
power, and that it owes no allegiance, gratitude or sub- 
jection to capital."^ J. Bronterre O'Brien, an ardent ad- 
mirer of Robespierre and also of Baboeuf (often consid- 
ered the first leader of proletarian Socialism), published in 
1836 a translation of Buonarroti's history of Baboeuf 's 
conspiracy, thus for the first time introducing the work 
to the English-speaking public. He was not wholly a 
Marxian Socialist but he called himself a " social demo- 
crat," and in his book, The Progress and Phases of Human 
Slavery, he did much to popularize the phrase and to 
develop the concept of "wage-slavery." The Marxian 
theory of the total abolition of other classes by the vic- 
tory of the proletariat has never been more lucidly ex- 
pressed than by G. J. Harney. " As regards the work- 
ing men swamping other classes, the answer is easy, " he 
declared, ''other classes have no right even to exist. To 
prepare the way for the absolute supremacy of the work- 
ing classes . . . preparatory to the abolition of the system 
of classes, is the mission of the Red Republican y^= Even 

' The Chartist leaders were not forgotten, however. A volume of 
RevoltUionary Rhymes and Songs for Socialists which appeared in 1886 
included Ernest Jones's " Song of the Lower Classes." 

^ Notes to the Peopte, p. 74. 

* The Red Republica^i, July 6, 1850. Italics in the original. 



ig,8 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [446 

Feargus O'Connor, who had insisted that he was "neither 
Sociahst nor communist,"' based his land plan on the 
Marxian principle of the existence of an industrial re- 
serve army.^ He believed that wages were only kept 
down by the presence of a large body of the unemployed 
ready to take the places of dissatisfied workingmen, and 
that if a sufficient number of operatives could be settled 
on the land, the employers would be forced to meet the 
terms of their remaining operatives. 

But it would be wrong to make too much of minor 
points of agreement between Socialist theory and the 
opinions of a few Chartist leaders, since, as the Chartists 
never made their economic program definite, it is im- 
possible to tell to what extent the party leaders repre- 
sented the views of the masses of their followers. Tactics 
rather than theory was the chief bequest of the Chartists 
to succeeding generations of British radicals. For a 
time the workingmen of Great Britain abandoned inde- 
pendent political action and sought to realize their aims 
within the Liberal and Conservative party organizations; 
but they never forgot that during the period of the 
Chartist agitation they had stood alone as a class and 
made their strength feared even while they were still 
without political power.] The Independent Labour Party 
is in a sense the present-day representative of the 
National Charter Association, less because it favors 
similar political and economic reforms than because it is 
avowedly the party of a class. The effect of more than 
a decade of self-reliant pohtical activity in teaching the 
British artizan to study and think for himself upon the 
issues of the day, to express his meaning clearly on the 

^Northern Star, Oct. 28, 1848. 

'Cy. Tildsley, Die Entstehung der Chartistenbewegung, p. 133. 



447] PERMANENT INFLUENCE OF CHARTISM 199 

public platform, to practise the technique of parliament- 
ary law, to experience the realities of legislative and 
administrative work, must have rendered him a far more 
useful citizen when he was finally enfranchised than he 
would have been if the suffrage had been conferred upon 
him without special effort on his part to obtain it. 

Chartism educated the people also in the narrower 
sense of the term " education." To many workingmen 
the cheap Chartist papers were the first periodicals they 
had ever read, or at least regularly bought. It was 
through these papers as a medium that they first studied 
the world beyond the range of their own experience. The 
Chartist press was very frequently their sole text-book 
of history, political geography, English literature, eco- 
nomics and political theory. Most of the Chartist peri- 
odicals printed a large amount of poetry, general or 
propagandist; most of them published notes on events 
in foreign countries which were thought to be of interest 
to democrats ; many, especially of those to which J. 
Bronterre O'Brien contributed, chronicled the origins of 
democracy in the remote past, recounting the deeds and 
projects of the Gracchi, the rebellion of Wat Tyler, and 
other romantic chapters in the history of the working 
classes. It goes without saying that the party press 
presented both ancient and modern history in a highly 
colored form ; conservatives were always represented as 
villains and the champions of the poor as incapable of 
wrong-doing. But at least such campaigns of education 
gave a background to the agitation for the Charter, 
supplied a sense of historical continuity with the popular 
struggles of the past, and created a fraternal feeling for 
the working classes in other countries. 

The evidences of Chartist interest in the democratic 
movements in continental Europe and in America are 



200 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [44S 

numerous and striking ; indeed, if the Chartist periodicals 
may be supposed to have had any influence on their 
readers, Chartism must have done more than any other 
factor to form the opinions of radical workingmen upon 
questions of foreign policy. But the degree of attention 
which the Chartists bestowed upon events in other coun- 
tries was not constant, being very much greater after 
the revolutionary year of 1848 than it had ever been 
before. Such Chartist periodicals as The English Re- 
public, The Democratic Review, The Northern Tribune, 
The Red Republican, The Friend of the People, The 
National Instructor, and other organs of the party in 
existence after 1848 gave as much or more space to the 
revolutions on the Continent than to the agitation for 
the Charter in England. In the years when the Chartist 
movement in England seemed nearest success and when 
the revolutionary movements in other European coun- 
tries seemed far from being equally strong, the majority 
of Chartists confined their attention to the domestic 
situation. But even in those days not a few of the party 
leaders followed with the greatest sympathy the progress 
of democracy abroad. In 1844 William Lovett helped 
to organize the Association of Democratic Friends of 
All Nations,^ and, in the same year, he supported a pro- 
test against the reception tendered by the British gov- 
ernment to Nicholas I, Tsar of Russia.^ 

The Chartists were particularly interested in the 
nationalist movements in Italy, Hungary and Poland, 
and the Hungarian war for independence inspired almost 
as much enthusiasm as had the outbreak of the revolu- 
tion in France. When the authority of the Habsburg 

^Lovett. Life and Struggles, p. 307. 
"^ Ibid., pp. 297-9. 



449] PERMANENT INFLUENCE OF CHARTISM oQl 

monarch had been restored in Hungary with the help 
of Russia, the Chartists made heroes of the Hungarian 
patriots and considered the rulers of Austria and Russia 
as enemies of human liberty everywhere and therefore as 
potential enemies of England. A typical Chartist ver- 
dict grouped together Mazzini and Kossuth as " the two 
highest models of political virtue existing." ' Kossuth 
was accorded a royal welcome by the workingmen of 
Great Britain during his exile. Ernest Jones, however, 
always more of an internationalist than a nationalist, did 
not wish the Chartists to join the popular demonstra- 
tions until it became clear whether Kossuth was really a 
champion of the poor and oppressed in all countries or 
simply a brave warrior who cared only for his own land 
and people. When Kossuth declared against Socialism, 
Jones attacked him savagely in Notes to the People,"" — 
a course which probably cost Jones more friends than any 
other act of his life, as Kossuth was still at the height 
of his popularity.3 

When the Austrian general Haynau, notorious for his 
severity in crushing the revolutionists of Italy and Hun- 
gary, incautiously visited England in 1850, he met with a 
very different reception from that which greeted Kossuth. 
The Chartist weekly, The Red Republican, urged that he 
be not permitted to land and that in case he did so there 
should be "a manifestation of public opinion." "^ This 
latter hope was gratified. The draymen of Barclay and 
Perkins, brewers, attacked General Haynau with whips 

"^ Cooper' s Journal , Jan. 12, 1850. 

* Notes to the People, vol. ii (1852), pp. 604-6. 

* 7%* Christian Socialist, Dec. 20, 1851, also expressed disappoint- 
ment at Kossuth's anti-Socialist attitude, but in a much milder vein 
than Ernest Jones. 

^ The Red Republican, Sept. 7, 1850. 



202 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [450 

and sticks and forced him to flee for safety through the 
London streets. The Chartists were dehghted by this 
episode^ which so exactly met their expressed wishes, 
and the populace in general felt the same joy. The 
Russian government shared to the full the unpopularity 
of the Austrian, and some of the Chartists urged that 
England intervene to rescue Hungary from the combined 
armies of Austria and Russia, even if it meant a war with 
both countries.^ It is probable that the Chartists, in 
spite of their declining influence with the British masses, 
did something to prepare them to welcome the Crimean 
war when it came as a war for European liberties against 
a pitiless oppressor. 

The Chartists were unanimously anti-militarist in the 
sense that they disliked the heavy taxation necessary to 
keep up a large standing army, that they opposed all 
wars designed to extend the boundaries or the influence 
of the British Empire, and that they denounced especially 
every rumor of war with other nations whose political 
system was more or less tinctured with liberalism, such as 
France. But they never endorsed the principle of Cobden 
and Bright that England should never interfere in a 
European war that did not directly involve her own 
sovereignty and independence. As early as 1849 the 
Chartist journalist Thomas J. Wooler (writing under his 
pen-name of "The Black Dwarf") forecasted a coming 
war in which Turkey and England, perhaps with the aid 
of France, would be on one side and Austria and Russia 
on the other.3 Except for the neutrality of Austria, as 
unexpected to most professional diplomats as it was to 

' The Red Republican, Sept. 14, 1850. 
' The Democratic Review, August, 1849. 
' The Plain Speakers, Oct. 13, 1849. 



45 1 ] PERMANENT INFLUENCE OF CHARTISM 203 

the Chartists, this prediction exactly fitted the impending 
Crimean conflict. But the Chartists cared comparatively 
little for the issue of the integrity of the Ottoman 
Empire ; their aim was rather the dismemberment of 
the anti-national Russian Empire. In 1853 W. J. Linton 
demanded " War with Russia. Not in the Black Sea but 
in the Baltic,'' "^ and throughout 1854 The Northern 
Tribune urged an alliance with Poland.^ After the war 
was ended, Ernest Jones denounced the British govern- 
ment for not having carried it on by an alliance with 
all the oppressed or menaced nationalities within the 
Russian Empire or at her boundaries, instead of acting 
solely on behalf of Turkey.^ 

The general attitude of the Chartists to foreign affairs 
presents many phases of interest. They knew the 
national aspirations of Italy very well, mainly through 
the personality of Joseph Mazzini, whose writings were 
printed or reprinted in several Chartist periodicals ; they 
were familiar also with the wrongs of Hungary, Poland 
and Greece. But non-vocal nationalities which had not 
succeeded in getting their claims presented before the 
British public received little attention from the Chartists. 
An illuminating example of this is afforded by the " Map 
of Republican Europe" published in The English Re- 
public.'' There is no need to review in detail this Utopian 
map of Europe, except to note in passing how the best 
known nationalities were favored. Poland was made to 
extend from the Drina and the Dnieper rivers on the 
east to the Oder on the west, and from the Black Sea to 

' The English Republic, Nov. 19, 1853 ; the italics are in the original. 
'W. J. Linton and Thomas Cooper were the chief Chartist contrib- 
utors to this periodical. 

^Evenings with the People. Address of Jan. 27, 1857. 
* The English Republic, May 22, 1854. 



204 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [452 

the Baltic ; Bohemia and the Slavic parts of the Habsburg 
empire south of the Carpathians were annexed to Hun- 
gary; Macedonia, Albania and Constantinople went to 
Greece. Another peculiarity of the Chartist writings on 
foreign politics was their tendency to forget the different 
political needs and stages of development of different 
countries and to read all revolutionary movements else- 
where in the terms of the contemporary class struggle 
in England. For example, the Chartists tended to view 
all the moderate constitutional monarchists of Germany, 
Italy and other parts of continental Europe as enemies 
of the working class, and their projected reforms as 
" Whiggery." Few Chartists retained much interest in 
the French republic after the defeat of Louis Blanc and 
the " reds " and the resulting ascendancy of the bour- 
geoisie and the conservative peasantry; the establish- 
ment of the empire, while the Chartists unanimously 
deplored it, they regarded as of less moment than the 
closing of the national workshops. 

The foreign country most admired by the Chartists, 
the nation which they most frequently compared with 
England to the disadvantage of the latter, was the United 
States of A_merica. When the Chartist movement was 
strongest and the Chartist press most widely read and 
therefore most effective in forming public opinion, the 
diplomatic relations between the United States and Great 
Britain were far from cordial. The unsettled Maine 
boundary, the question of the ownership of the Oregon 
territory, the American sympathy shown to the Canadian 
rebels in 1837, the disputed fishing rights claimed by 
American citizens in the territorial waters of Canada, and 
other vexing issues which lay between the two gov- 
ernments, kept up an irritation that was greatly increased 
by the anti-American attitude of prominent English 



453] PERMANENT INFLUENCE OF CHARTISM 205 

writers and of the majority of upper-class newspapers 
and periodicals. Chartist periodicals such as the Power 
of the Pence, Efiglish Chartist Circular and many others, 
labored faithfully to inspire in their readers the con- 
trary sentiment of admiration for American institutions. 
Chartists generally agreed with John Fielden's charac- 
terization of the founders of the American republic 
as "the wisest men that as a body ever existed."' In 
1849, during the height of the emigration movement, 
Joseph Barker urged all who intended leaving England 
to seek their homes in the United States rather than in 
any British colony. ^ Barker followed his own advice and 
filled many issues of The People with accounts of Ameri- 
can conditions, which in the main were very favorable. 

The Chartists valued the United States less for its 
own sake than as a great experiment in political democ- 
racy, and they were quick to criticize what they consid- 
ered the weak points of American civilization. Without 
exception they disliked the " peculiar institution " of 
chattel slavery and every act of the American govern- 
ment, such as the Mexican war, which tended to extend 
or strengthen the slavery system. They discerned the 
rise of industrialism and its attendant evils in the new 
country and warned American democrats that their 
political liberties would be endangered if the growth of 
great fortunes were permitted to continue. The Na- 
tional Instructor published in 1850 a series of articles on 
the land-reform movement in America, and many other 
Chartist papers commended the land reformers and their 
organ Young America as the hope of democracy in the 
west. 3 But the very fear shown by the Chartists that 

'Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement, p. 61. 
^The People, vol. i, p. 121. 

'^ Cf. The Red Republican, July 13, 1850; Power of the Pence, Nov. 
II, 1848; The Democratic Review, June, 1849. 



2o6 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [454 

American institutions might fail was an index of their 
interest in the future of the country. When it is re- 
membered that the writings and speeches of Radical and 
Chartist leaders were during the decade which preceded 
the American Civil War almost the sole source of the 
political opinions of the British working classes, it is 
scarcely surprising that they should have supported the 
cause of the preservation of that nation which they had 
been taught to consider the most important democracy 
in the world. The Lancashire operatives who were the 
chief sufferers from the blockade of Confederate ports 
which cut ofif the usual cotton shipments to England 
were, in spite of their material interest in a speedy re- 
storation of peace, more consistent supporters of the 
cause of the North than any other considerable section 
of the British public, and they were also as a class the 
most closely associated with the Chartist movement and 
the most completely imbued with Chartist teachings. 

Among the issues of the present day which are rooted 
in the activities of the Chartist period is the agitation 
for woman suffrage.' Whenever the Chartists spoke of 
" universal suffrage " or the followers of Sturge of 
" complete suffrage ", manhood suffrage was invariably 
understood. Few of the party ever thought of applying 
the logic of democracy which they employed against 
other disqualifications for the franchise to the limitation 
based on sex. But the Chartist movement was none 
the less a potent factor in introducing working women 
to political life, for women bore a considerable share 
in the agitation for manhood suffrage. The report 
by Mr. Cripps in the House of Commons on the number 

^On the general question of the position of women in the Chartis 
movement, see especially Schluter, Die Chartistenbewegung, pp. %^ 
308 



455] PERMANENT INFLUENCE OF CHARTISM 2OJ 

of signatures to the Chartist petition of 1848 contained 
the statement that " in every 100,000 names there were 
8,200 women, "' The only particular importance at- 
tached to this finding at the time was that it weakened 
the case of the Chartists, because it meant that a very 
considerable proportion of those whom O'Connor and 
others had claimed as supporters of the petition would 
not be enfranchised even under the Charter. But to-day 
it is easy to see more than a negative significance in this 
remarkable proportion of women's signatures, since it 
served as measure of the interest which many English 
women had begun to take in the issues of public life. 

The idea of suffrage as a right equally of men and 
of women, was probably rarely considered by the 
majority of the party, yet was not wholly foreign to the 
Chartist movement. William Lovett favored woman suff- 
rage and had even contemplated introducing it into the 
Charter." The plan was abandoned as too far in advance 
of the age to win favor, but, while the Chartist party 
never committed itself to equal suffrage, there was noth- 
ing to prevent individual members from urging it. Be- 
sides William Lovett, other prominent leaders, including 
John La Mont^ and W. J. Linton,+ believed in woman suff- 
rage, and in 1842 a number of meetings of Chartist women 
passed resolutions favoring it.^ It is impossible to say 
how much influence the equal suffragists of the party may 
have had in bringing the issue to public attention, for 
several decades were to elapse after the end of the Char- 
tist movement before the suffrage question entered the 

'^Hansard, 3rd series, vol. xcviii, p. 290. 

* Lovett, Life and Struggles, p. 170. 
^English Chartist Circular, vol. ii, p. 11 1. 

* The English Republic, Feb. 22, 1851. 

^ Annual Register, vol, Ixxxiv, pp. 163-4; i87' 



2o8 THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [456 

sphere of practical politics. At any rate they prepared 
the minds of the classes associated with the Chartist 
movement to consider equal suffrage as a possibility 
when the time came for it to be more effectively agitated. 
When the great wave of class discontent which we 
call the Chartist movement had passed, the individuals 
who had been associated with the movement as leaders 
or as followers lost most of their importance for history. 
Most of the Chartists became wholly absorbed in the life 
of their trades-unions and co-operative societies and al- 
lied themselves politically with the regular political par- 
ties, chiefly with the Radical wing of the Liberal party 
captained at that time by John Bright. Some emigrated 
to America or to Australia."^ One by one the leaders 
died ofif, emigrated, or deserted the party for other fields 
of social service or political agitation. Henry Hether- 
ington, Joseph Williams, Alexander Sharpe and others 
of the party died during the cholera epidemic of 1849.'' 
John Fielden died in 1847; John Collins, Lovett's asso- 
ciate, in 1850.3 Feargus O'Connor died insane in 1855. 
William Lovett continued to work in various causes of 
reform and finally became the proprietor of the National 
Hall in Holborn. Vincent became a lecturer. J. R. 
Stephens returned to preaching at Ashton, and Richard 
Oastler published a Tory democratic periodical which he 
named " Altar, Throne and Cottage." McDouall emi- 
grated to Australia. Reynolds continued as a radical 
journalist. Julian Harney became secretary of a Repub- 
lican Brotherhood, R. G. Gammage, the historian of the 

^ The Chartists who went to Australia took an active part in the dem- 
ocratic movements there and some of the old Chartist songs were long 
familiar in the gold-mining districts. Schliiter, op. cit., p. 349. 

'Gammage, op. cit., p. 349. 

^ Ibid., pp. 401-2. 



457] PERMANENT INFLUENCE OF CHARTISM 209 

movement, of a Democratic Association. J. Bronterre 
O'Brien lectured for the National Reform League. 
Ernest Jones "outlived the Chartist era; lived to return 
to peaceful agitation, to hold public controversy with . . . 
Professor Blackie of Edinburgh, on the relative advan- 
tages of republicanism and monarchy, and to stand for a 
Parliamentary borough at the general election of 1868; 
and then his career was closed by death."' Thomas 
Cooper, who lived till 1892, continued his literary activity 
and also took up evangelistic work after being converted 
from scepticism.^ W. J. Linton, already well known as 
a wood-engraver, devoted most of his attention to his 
art, although he always retained his interest in social 
and political reform. In 1866 he emigrated to America, 
where he lived until his death in 1897. 

There is a certain pathos in tracing the after careers 
of these Chartist leaders. Several of them died in pov- 
erty, most of them sank out of sight among the crowd 
of petty journalists and routine social workers, very 
few attained such fame outside the movement as they 
had known within it. Even more pathetic was the dis- 
appointment of a whole generation of working men and 
women who were forced at last to resign themselves to 
the continued existence of upper-class rule in the state 
and to an indefinite postponement of the complete eman- 
cipation of their class in industry. But neither the of- 
ficers nor the privates of the Chartist movement had 
really fought in vain. They left the mind of England 
changed, — perhaps the greatest of all possible revolutions. 
The enfranchised classes had come to recognize the ne- 
cessity for a continually expanding program of reform as 

'J. McCarthy, History of Our Own Times, vol. ii, p. 17. 
' Life of Thomas Cooper, passim. 



2IO THE DECLINE OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT [458 

the one method of preventing a violent and disastrous 
revolution. The unenfranchised classes had come to know 
themselves ; to be conscious both of their strength and 
of their weakness. The very faults and blunders which 
wrecked Chartism have been turned to good account 
as a warning to later working-class movements. If the 
Chartist movement did not immediately obtain for Eng- 
land the Charter, at least it organized the people to 
make full use of democracy when it came. 



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212 BIBLIOGRAPHY [460 

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46i] BIBLIOGRAPHY 213 

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INDEX 



Agriculture, improvements in, 131- 

America, Chartist interest in the 
United States of, 204-6 

Anti-Corn Law movement, rela- 
tion of Chartism to, 45, 47-50, 
80, 156-7 

Atwood, Thomas, 19, 57 

Barker, Joseph, 38, 43, 173, 180, 

205 
Bright, John, 52, 80, 169, 182 
Brougham, Lord, 22, 118, 184 

Charter, text of the, 12-3 

Chartist party, internal organiza- 
tion of the, 19-20, 62-3, 78, 82, 
1 10- 1 

Christian Socialist movement, 172- 
177 

Class-consciousness in the Char- 
tist movement, 23-8, 59, 76, 144-5, 
197-9, 204 

Cobbett, William, 19, 57, 58 

Collins, John, 19, 29, 72, 208 

Complete Suffrage Association, 
72-7 

Cooper, Thomas, 73, 77, 79, 82, 84, 
89, 111-2, 149, 150, 154, 155, 157, 

176, 189-92, 191 -2, 209 
Cooperative movement, 166, 174-S, 

176-7, 189-92; Chartist attitude 

to, 34, 40, 176-7, 191 -2 
Corn Law reform, 65-6, 119-24 
Crimean War, Chartist support of 

the, 202-3 

Disraeli, Benjamin, 182, 186-7 
Dunoombe, Thomas, 20, 61, 94, 

177, 192 

Emigration from the United King- 
dom, 64, 119, 178-80, 205, 208-9 
Engels, Friedrich, 27, 177, 196 

Factory regulation, 124-7, 165 ; 
Chartist advocacy of, 45, 51 ; 
upper class opposition to, 51-4 
463] 



Foodstuffs, retail prices of, 120-1, 

123, 137 
Foreign policy. Chartist interest 

in, 187, 199-206 
Frost, John, 60, 94, 146, 183 

Gammage, R. G., iii, 155, 208 
Gladstone, W. E., 185, 186, 187 

Harney, G. Julian, 83, 99, 106, 109, 

149, 196, 197, 208 
Holyoake, G. J., 155, 158, 173 

Ireland, relation of Chartism to 
revolutionary movements in, 95- 
96, 164, 179-80. 

Jones, Ernest, 27, 33, 34, 37, 38. 

39, 40, 89-90, 96, 97, 99, 102, 103, 
109-14, 144, 146, 148, 149, 151-2, 
155, 164, 176, 189, 191, 195, 196. 
197, 201, 209 

Kingsley, Charles, 40, 79, 172, 174, 
176, 180 

Labor troubles, 45, 67-71, 93-4, 

175-6, 193-5 
Land plan of Feargus O'Connor, 

40, 84-93, ISO, 198 

Land question, Chartist interest 
in, 34-43, 205 

Linton, W. J., 106, 155, 203, 207, 
209 

London Working Men's Associa- 
tion, 19, 27 

Lovett, William, 19, 29, 33, 38, 41, 
47, 48, 72, 75, 81-2, 83, 107, 146, 
149, 154, 179-80, 200, 207, 208 

Ludlow, J. M., 174, 176 

Macaulay, T. B., 30 

Massey, Gerald, 155 

Maurice, F. D., 176 

McDouall, Dr., 20, 69, 82, 102, 103, 

208 
" Moral force " Chartism, 68-9, 

82-4, 144, 147-8. 

215 



2l6 



INDEX 



[464 



National finances, condition of 

the, 32, 1 1 7-8, 133-4 
National Reform League, 107-8 | 
Neale, Edward Vansittart, 175, 176 

O'Brien, J. Bronterre, •^3. 34, 36, \ 
42, 43, 59, 72, 82, 88-9, 96, 102, j 
104, 107, 108, 146, 149, 150, 155, j 
179. 197, I99» 209 I 

O'Connor, Feargus, 20, 22» 36, 40, i 
41, 47, 50-1, 57, 69, 72, 73, 75, j 
78-9, 80, 81, 83, 84-93, 94-5, 96, : 
97, 99, loi, 102, 104, 105, 109, 
144, 146, 149, 150-2, 155, 164, 
179, 192, 19s, 198 

Owen, Robert, influence on Char- 
tist movement, 45, 173 

Palmerston, Viscount, 183-4, 186 
Peel, Sir Robert, 52, 64-5, 121 -3, 

186 
Periodicals, Chartist, 14, 80, 105-6, 

108-9, 149, 199 
Petitions, Chartist. In 1839, 60-1 ; 

in 1842, 61-3; in 1848, 97-102, 

138-40, 170 
" Physical force " Chartism, 60, 

66-71, 82-4, 95-100, 102-4, 144, 

147-8 
Place, Francis, 18-9, 158-9 
Poor Law Amendment of 1834, 

Chartist attitude to, 45, 47, 54-9, 

159-60; modified, 127 

Radicals, attitude to the Charter 
of the, 18, 22, 47, 72, 104-5, 182 



Reform Bill of 1832, dissatisfac- 
tion with the, 21 

Reforms, political, after the dis- 
appearance of Chartism, 181 -4 

Republicanism in the Chartist 
movement, 96, 106, 185, 203-4 

Reynolds, G. W. M., 96, 107, 208 

Russell, Lord John, 22, 28-9, 30, 
104, 118, 121, 181, 182, 186 

Socialistic tendencies in Chartism, 

39, no, 196-8, 201 
Stephens, Joseph R., 27, 56, 81, 

83, 146, 173, 208 
Sturge, Joseph, 72-y, 82, 148, 173 

Taxation, Chartist views on, 2)3> 

185 
Trades unions, 45, 166, 175-6, 

192-6; Chartist attitude towards 

the, 45-6, 192, 195-6 

Vincent, Henry, 19, 48, 72, 72,, 75, 
208 

Wages. In agriculture, 131, 133, 
136, 165 ; in hand labor, 130-1, 
165 ; in manufacture, 129-30, 136, 
137; in mining, 130, 165-6 

Woman suffrage and the Chartist 
movement, 206-8 

Working classes in Great Britain, 
condition of the, 46, 63-4, 119, 
127-9, ^^1^-7, 160-6, 167-8 



VITA 

The author of the foregoing study was born Septem- 
ber 2, 1892 at Laramie, Wyoming. He received his ele- 
mentary education in the pubhc schools of Laramie and 
of New York City, and prepared for college at the De 
Witt Clinton High School. In June 1912 he received from 
Columbia College the degree of Bachelor of Science with 
highest honors in modern history, chemistry and English 
literature. In 1913 he received the degree of Master of 
Arts in the Faculty of Political Science of Columbia Uni- 
versity, and has since acted as assistant in history in 
Columbia College and in the extension work of the Uni- 
versity. In the departments of History and of Eco- 
nomics he has taken courses under Professors James T. 
Shotwell, James Harvey Robinson, F. H. Giddings, W. 
R. Shepherd, W. M. Sloane, W. A. Dunning, V. G. 
Simkhovitch, R. E. Chaddock, K. F. T. Rathgen, Dr. B. 
M. Anderson and Mr. R. R. Hill and has attended the 
seminar of Professor Shotwell. In 1914 he published 
Fated or Free, a philosophical dialog, and in 191 5 Peace 

with Honor, an historical pamphlet. 

217 



LIBRftRY OF CONGRESS 




020 704 217 1 ^ 



